Rose Luminiello

Biography & Research

Rose Luminiello is an assistant teaching professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a core-affiliated faculty member of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement With Religion. She is also a faculty affiliate of the Keough School's Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. 

Her research and teaching focus on Catholic social teaching, religion and political resistance, and identity-building, with a special focus on migration, Ireland and Poland.

Luminiello is a comparative and intellectual historian of modern Europe and migration, with a focus on the intellectual and social histories of Catholic political protest and resistance in Ireland and Poland. Her research focus is on building out the intellectual hinterlands of Catholic social teaching and its foundations in the papacy and philosophy of Pope Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum (1891), setting these in the global context of Catholic political engagement.

In doing so, Luminiello's work takes on questions about the relationship between citizens and the state, and the interplay of religious identity and language with those of politics in the civil sphere. She is currently working on a monograph titled "Modernizing Catholicism: Rerum Novarum and Moral Legitimacy in Ireland and Poland, 1878-1914," and has co-edited the interdisciplinary volume "Engaging Authority: Political Community and Citizenship" (2021).

Luminiello joined the Keough School's  Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, in 2022, first as a postdoctoral researcher and then during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 academic years as a visiting assistant research professor. Prior to joining the Keough-Naughton Institute, Luminiello was a co-funded postdoctoral research associate with Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame (at Notre Dame Rome and in South Bend) and the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies (RIISS) at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, working to develop a digital humanities project, "Irish Women Religious in the Anglophone World, 1840-1940." Much of her research work draws together archives in Rome, Ireland, Australia and the United States.

Luminiello’s research interests and publications also extend to the global history of women religious, and their impacts on the social and political development of burgeoning national identities in Catholic migrant communities in the 19th and 20 th centuries, on which she has published in international journals. She holds a Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Modern British and Irish History from the University of Edinburgh and a Ph.D. in  history from the University of Aberdeen, where she studied with Robert I. Frost and Michael Brown and held the Comparative Statecraft and Constitutional Thought Studentship from the interdisciplinary research Center for Citizenship, Civil Society, and Rule of Law.

Her publications can be found on her academia.edu page.

Courses

• Migrants and Mobility - Read a student blog post about this undergraduate course
• Catholic Social Teaching & the People (Keough School interdisciplinary seminar)