Dr. Minster teaches courses in English, in Religious Studies, and in sustainability, and is an advisor for three interdisciplinary minors: Religious Studies, Sustainability, and Clean Energy. With an academic background in nineteenth-century American and European literature and in Biblical Hebrew poetry, his interests lie in the meanings of writing, religion, and nature, with special attention to practices of walking and pilgrimage. He writes and translates poetry and is active in promoting sustainability in engineering education.
Academic Degrees
- BPhil, Miami University, 1991
- MDiv, University of Chicago, 1995
- MA, University of California, Davis, 1997
- PhD, Indiana University, 2004
Awards & Honors
- Max Ehrmann Poetry Competition, Grand Prize, 2015
- Martin Luther King Leadership Award, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2012
- Service Award, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2007
Publications & Presentations
- Co-author, “Student Expectations, Disciplinary Boundaries, and Competing Narratives in a First-Year Sustainability Cohort,” Educating for Sustainability in Unsustainable Environments, forthcoming
- “Indiana Sestina,” Mapping The Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry, Brick Street, 2016
- “Design for Interdisciplinarity: The Home for Environmentally Responsible Engineering (HERE),” Engineering Education for Sustainable Development Conference, Bruges, 2016
- “Valuing, Learning: Revising a Sustainability Curriculum for First-Year Students,” ASEE Annual Conference, Seattle, 2015
- “The Needs of Others: Social Entrepreneurship Versus the Profit Motive,” Engineering Education for Sustainable Development Conference, Vancouver, 2015
- “What We Talk About When We Talk About Sustainability, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship,” Engineering Sustainability Conference, Pittsburgh, 2015
- “Sustainability and Professional Identity in Engineering Education,” Higher Education for Sustainability: Cases, Challenges, and Opportunities for Across the Curriculum, Routledge, 2013
- “Growing Pains: Curriculum Design and Redesign in a First-Year Sustainability Cohort,” Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, 2013
- “The Rhetoric of Ascent in An Inconvenient Truth and Everything’s Cool,” Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, University of Virginia, 2010
Research Experiences
- Walking and pilgrimage in religion and literature
- Poetics and religious experience
- Lyric poetry and translation
- Education for sustainable development
- Liberal and interdisciplinary education
Teaching Interests
- Writing
- 19th Century literature
- Environmental writing
- Literature and religion