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