Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program

Applications are now being accepted for the Maritime Studies Program of Williams College and Mystic Seaport, a semester long program based in Mystic, Connecticut that looks at the world’s oceans.  Students explore beyond the classroom in an interdisciplinary, academically-rigorous fashion.  Our semester is packed with travel, learning about our own country as well as the global ocean and coastal environment.  We read Moby-Dick at Mystic Seaport, with a historic whaleship nearly identical to Melville’s Acushnet.  We read Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind beside the Mystic River estuary.  We read, among others: Hemingway, Dana, Kipling, Steinbeck, Twain, Chopin, Langston Hughes, and Sarah Orne Jewett.  We go to sea on a tall ship for more than a week out of sight of land.  We travel in vans along the coasts of central California, the Pacific Northwest, and southern Louisiana.  Our home is Mystic Seaport, The Museum of America and the Sea, where students in addition to their four courses (Literature of the Sea, Maritime History, Marine Policy, and Oceanography or Marine Ecology), also take a skills course, such as blacksmithing, small boat sailing, or sea music.

As a Williams College program, students receive a Williams transcript and our curriculum is approved by and is consistent with courses taught at Williams.

Applications for the spring 2010 are due by November 15; for fall 2010 by May 1, 2010.

For more information, go to http://www.williams.edu/williamsmystic/.