Dr Rose Luminiello (History)
My interest in the history of Poland began during a seminar in my MSc Modern British and Irish History at the University of Edinburgh, when I questioned the similarities between the historical mythologization of Irish tragedies with those of Poland. Though in that moment the question was guided only by an instinct born of cultural memory from my own Polish heritage and friends, a doctoral dissertation comparing Irish and Polish Catholic political developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries soon followed. Under the supervision of Prof. Robert I Frost and Prof. Michael Brown, I wrote my doctorate, Confronting Modernity: Leo XIII, 'Rerum Novarum' and the Catholic Church in Ireland and Prussian Poland, 1878-1914 with funding from the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society, and Rule of Law (CISRUL) at the University of Aberdeen. I'm currently working on a monograph derived from the dissertation, positing that the emergence of Catholic Social Teaching in 1891 revolutionized the religio-political identities and Catholic communities in Ireland, Poland, and the Americas. I am particularly interested in how Polish Catholics develop political and social identities within concepts of civil society at home and abroad. In my current post as a jointly funded Research Fellow at the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, I'm researching not only intellectual and political developments in Polish and Irish Catholic communities, but also the actors who perpetuate, resist, and shift political concepts in the community within the ranks of the Church itself, through the social work of women religious (religious sisters/nuns).