Mark Curnutte

Biography

Curnutte is the founding director of the Social Justice Internship Program in the Department of Sociology and Gerontology, a residential J-term program that placed 60 Miami students in immersive experiential learning opportunities in Cincinnati in its first five years (2020-2024).

A 34-year newspaper reporting veteran, Curnutte begins his sixth year teaching full-time at Miami in 2024-2025. He was part of "The Cincinnati Enquirer's" Pulitzer Prize-winning team for "Seven Days of Heroin" in 2017 and selected three times as top reporter in Ohio by the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ). As "The Enquirer's" NFL-Cincinnati Bengals beat reporter (2000-2008), Curnutte's reporting on minority coaches, coordinators, and front office personnel was used in formation of the NFL's hiring policy, the Rooney Rule. In 2013, Curnutte won a Ford Foundation grant for international social justice reporting and completed work on childhood slavery in Haiti and the plight of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic's sugar industry, the latter timed to release of a US Labor Department report corroborating his findings of human rights violations.

Awards

Received the prestigious Bishop Medal "for meritorious public service" from the Miami University Alumni Association in 2015.

Education

• Completed Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Professional Certificate Program, Miami University, June 2022.
• B.A. English and Geography, Miami University, 1984

 

Research Interests

• Racism in the United States
• Black American History, Poverty
• Relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Courses Taught

• SJS-GEO 159: Peacebuilding
• SJS-SOC 165: Social Justice Perspectives
• SJS-SOC 215: Empowerment I
• SJS-SOC 303: Life After Graduation
• SJS-SOC 323: Social Justice and Change
• SJS-SOC-CRT-DST 470: Political and Social Movements:
• WST 231: Interdisciplinary Inquiry:
• JRN 101: Journalism and American Life
• JRN 201: Reporting and News Writing
• JRN 318: Advanced Storytelling in Journalism

Selected Publications

• "Social Justice in the 21st Century: An Introduction" (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2024)
• "Across the Color Line: Reporting 25 Years in Black Cincinnati" (University of Cincinnati Press, 2019) https://ucincinnatipress.uc.edu/9781947602014/across-the-color-line/
• "A Promise in Haiti: A Reporter's Notes on Families and Daily Lives," 2011, author, Vanderbilt University PRess, https://www.vanderbilt.edu/university-press/book/9780826517838
• "4 addresses in 4 month," 2019, the Cincinnati Enquirer, author, https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2019/07/10/cincinnati-child-poverty-homelessness/1298790001/
• "Labor Department finds bitterness in sugar workers' lives," 2013, author, USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/03/sugar-workers-human-labor-rights/2919687/