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Rose Luminiello

Assistant Teaching Professor

The image shows a woman with long brown hair and clear-framed glasses, smiling pleasantly in a professional headshot. She is wearing a dark grey blazer over a patterned orange, navy, and white blouse, complemented by a delicate gold necklace.

4161 Jenkins Nanovic Halls
(574) 631-5504
rluminie@nd.edu

Rose Luminiello is an assistant teaching professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching focus on Catholic social teaching, religion and political resistance, and identity-building, with a special focus on migration, and on the histories of Ireland and Poland.

Prof. Luminiello joined the Ansari Institute in 2025, after a Visiting Assistant Research Fellowship and a postdoctoral research fellowship with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, 2022-2025. Prior to joining the Keough School of Global Affairs in these roles, Luminiello held a joint 2019-2022 Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame and the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies (RIISS) at the University of Aberdeen, where she completed extensive archival research in Ireland, Rome, and digital archives to form the foundations of a Digital Humanities mapping project, Globalizing Profession: Women Religious in the Anglophone World 1840-1940.
 
Luminiello completed her PhD History at the University of Aberdeen where she held the Comparative Statecraft and Constitutional Thought Studentship with the interdisciplinary Center for Citizenship, Civil Society, and Rule of Law (CISRUL). She studied under the supervision of Prof. Robert I. Frost and Prof. Michael Brown, and worked closely with her funding supervisor, Prof. Trevor Stack, with whom she edited Engaging Authority: Citizenship and Political Community (2022). Her PhD Dissertation was titled Confronting Modernity: Leo XIII, 'Rerum Novarum' and the Catholic Church in Ireland and Prussian Poland, 1878-1914. Her MSc Modern British and Irish history was completed at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Enda Delaney, and focuses on the role of women religious in creating social mobility in Ireland, and constructing identities in the Irish diasporas.
 
As a comparative and intellectual historian of modern Europe and migration, Luminiello researches the intellectual and social histories of Catholic political protest and resistance in Ireland and Poland. Looking through a comparative and international lens, her work builds 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 beyond theological treatise. She is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Modernizing Catholicism: "Rerum Novarum" and Moral Legitimacy in Ireland and Poland, which expands her PhD Dissertation to argue that modern Catholicism is not simply a body of theology, but a mode of belief and belonging in Catholic political communities.
 
Prof Luminiello offers courses that ask students to engage with topics from history to policy on the global stage to ask fundamental questions about how societies think about and organize themselves. Currently, she offers the following classes:
  • Nationalism(s): Ideas, Ideologies, and Realties
  • Catholic Social Teaching and "The People
  • Migrants and Mobility: Mass Movement from History to Policy
  • Introduction to Global Affairs