Centre College Faculty

Mark Rasmussen

Charles J. Luellen Professor of English
Chair of Division I (Humanities)

Telephone: 859-238-5234
E-mail: mark.rasmussen@centre.edu
Office: Crounse Hall—407

Mark Rasmussen is Charles J. Luellen Professor of English at Centre College, where he has taught since 1989.

His teaching responsibilities at the college encompass courses in medieval and Renaissance literature (including Chaucer, Arthurian literature, Spenser, and Shakespeare), literary criticism and theory, and the history of the English language, as well as the British literature survey and first-year humanities. He says that his greatest challenges, and greatest pleasures, as a teacher come from encouraging students to connect with the literature of earlier periods, and helping them to become better writers.

A summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, Rasmussen has published essays and given papers on a wide variety of medieval and Renaissance topics, including most recently a chapter on “Complaints and Daphnäida” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (2010). His edited collection, Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (2002), has had a lasting impact within its field, renewing attention to questions of form in English Renaissance literature. His current project is a study of poetic complaint from classical antiquity to the Renaissance.

Rasmussen has been a faculty leader, having served the College as director of writing, chair of the English program and the John C. Young Scholars committee, and having chaired the Committee on Curriculum and Academic Standards during a two-year process of curriculum reform. In 2001-02 and 2005-06 he directed Centre’s study abroad program in Strasbourg, France, and he served as co-director of the London program in spring 2009. He has received the Kirk award for teaching excellence, twice been named a Centre Scholar, and was awarded a Stodghill Research Professorship in 2009. He currently serves as Chair of the Division of Humanities.

In addition to his B.A. from Harvard, Rasmussen holds an M.A. from Harvard, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from The Johns Hopkins University, and he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

File last updated: 9/27/12