Because the Department of History seeks to encourage the expansion of empathic capabilities and understanding of alternative viewpoints that are concomitants of good study-abroad programs (and to the practice of the discipline of history) it tries to minimize the impediments to such study, provided of course that students who study abroad can fulfill the requirements of the history major.
We do insist, however, that all majors take a writing/research
seminar and, ordinarily, a readings seminar on campus, in the Middlebury history department. We also require all our majors to complete a two-term senior thesis on the Middlebury campus. For these reasons we insist that any student who plans to spend the full year abroad must take a writing/research seminar here before departing—usually in the Spring semester of the sophomore year. IS majors with a disciplinary focus in history get similar advice if they plan to do the two-term history senior thesis (optional for IS majors).
We routinely grant credit for history courses taken at Middlebury programs abroad (Starr programs), as well as at programs in which Middlebury participates as a consortium member. We also accept credits from programs in the English-speaking world (England, Australia, New Zealand) that have been approved by OCS and PAC. The department does have a preference, however, for those programs in England that are outside of London, where Americans are less concentrated. Finally, we do accept credits from other programs in the non-English speaking world (and in English-speaking portions of Africa and India) if the student can convince us that his/her preferred program offers something that more "standard" programs do not.
All of the proposed history courses are pre-approved by the student's advisor. Pre-approval, in turn, is determined by a careful assessment of the student's proposal and its compatibility with the major requirements. Courses in programs with which we are not familiar are not automatically approved; we check with OCS, and we now use OCS'on-line service to check on assessments of these programs by students who have gone through them. Because students frequently encounter changes in anticipated course offerings when they actually enroll, the Chair of the history department makes the final decision of what to approve after the student returns from his/her semester or year abroad.
Click here for information on Study Abroad Programs.