Dr. Mark Minster teaches English and specializes in literature and the environment, religion and literature, religion and ecology, creative writing, and 19th-century literature. He is co-director of the Home for Environmentally Responsible Engineering (HERE) program, a living-learning community for first-year students interested in sustainability and humanitarian engineering. Dr. Minster received a Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Leadership Award for his efforts to increase diversity awareness on campus.

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
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