Daniel Bate

Biography

Daniel Bate (formerly Daniel Rietze) teaches Italian language and culture at the University of Rhode Island. His scholarly interests focus on 19th- and 20th-century Italian Catholicism. He is curious about the varieties of spirituality that flourished in modern Italy and the creative ways individual Italian Catholics – many writing from the margins of the Church – navigated the encounter with an evolving world, bringing their faith into dialogue with modern culture, politics, and society. Daniel’s work combines literary analysis with archival research, and during his time in small archives and religious foundations throughout Italy, he has come to appreciate the insights that emerge when scholars and religious believers engage in conversation with each other.

Since moving to Providence in 2017, Daniel has become a proud Rhode Islander, and he loves the opportunity that teaching at URI gives him to deepen his bonds with his neighbors and contribute to life in the Ocean State. He believes that learning a new language is a chance to reimagine the world anew, word-by-word, and in his classes he strives to invite his students to reach for the words they need to articulate their own visions of how the world ought to be.

Research

• Italian Literature & Religious Thought (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries)
• Ecocriticism
• Theologies of Liberation
• Mysticism and Popular Religion
• Catholic Studies
• Microhistory
• The Church and the Politics of Modern Italy

Daniel’s current research project is entitled, “Earth Ecclesiastics: Catholic Eco-Theology and Politics in Twentieth-Century Italy.” It investigates ecological insights in the writings of Luigi Sturzo (1871-1959) and Primo Mazzolari (1890-1959), two antifascist priests who anticipated many of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. For these clerics and activists, advocating Catholics’ greater engagement in the modern world meant recognizing humans’ entanglement in material landscapes, and commitment to Catholic social teaching included commitment to better care for the Earth. This project has received funding from the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago, the Cesare Barbieri Endowment for Italian Culture, the American Catholic Historical Association, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

Education

• Ph.D. Candidate (ABD), Italian Studies, Brown University (anticipated completion 2025)
• M.A., Religious Studies, Brown University (anticipated completion 2025)
• M.A., Italian Studies, Brown University (2019)
• B.A., English & Italian literature, Yale University (2016)

Selected Publications

Conference proceedings:

• “Alla ricerca dell’amore: La nascita della fede religiosa di Amelia Della Pergola,” in Realismo magico agli esordi della Grande Guerra: Esegesi e attualità della ricerca bontempelliana, edited by Giovanna La Rosa, Caterina Lidano, and Chiara Milani. Rome: UniversItalia, 2022, pp. 101-117.

• “‘Seno mio ché non geme latte?’: Lo sguardo femminile nel Vangelo mistico di Maria Valtorta.” Offstream: Minority and Popular Cultures: Selected Articles: International Conference in Italian Studies, edited by Paolo Bernardini, Paolo Frascà, and Sara Galli. Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2019, pp. 81-95.

Book reviews:

• Review of America in Italian Culture: The Rise of a New Model of Modernity, 1861-1943 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2024), by Guido Bonsaver. Annali d’Italianistica 43 (2025): forthcoming.

• Review of Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022) by Diana Garvin. Annali d’Italianistica 41 (2023): 670-672.

• Review of Waymarking Italy’s Influence on the Environmental Imagination While on Pilgrimage to Assisi (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020) by Robert Lawrence France. Quaderni d’Italianistica 44.1 (2023): 158-160.

• Review of Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2019) by Elena Past. Annali d’Italianistica 39 (2021): 705-708.