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Michela Bertossa

Michela Bertossa

Michela Bertossa

Associated Faculty in Italian
she/her/hers

bertossa.1@osu.edu

208 Hagerty Hall
1775 College Rd.
Columbus, OH 43210

Google Map

Office Hours

By appointment.

Areas of Expertise

  • 19th - 21st century Italian Literature and Culture
  • Italian Cinema
  • Feminist and Gender Studies
  • Biopolitics
  • Medical Humanities
  • Transnational Studies

Education

  • PhD in Italian Studies, The Ohio State University, 2025
  • MA in Italian Studies, The Ohio State University, 2021
  • MA in Italian Language and Literature, University of Zurich, 2019
  • BA in Italian Language and Literature, University of Zurich, 2016
Michela Bertossa is an Associated Faculty Member in Italian at the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University.
 
She is a scholar of modern Italian literature and cinema with interdisciplinary interests in feminist and gender studies, biopolitics, and medical humanities. She obtained her PhD with a dissertation project titled Donne e Madri Degeneri: Reproduction, Gender, and Class in Liberal Italy (1861-1922), in which she focuses on the evolution of the female and maternal body in Italian literature and cinema in Liberal Italy and argues that 19th-century criminal anthropology was instrumental in shaping alternative representations of motherhood within these mediums. Her research further investigates how scientific discourses and the medicalization of motherhood have been embedded in the broader construction of Italian womanhood in Italian nationalistic discourses. She obtained her BA (2015) and MA (2018) in Italian Literature and Linguistics with minors in History, Gender Studies, and Islamic Studies at the University of Zurich. In 2015, she was an exchange student at the Institute of Cultural Studies at Leipzig University, Germany. Her Bachelor's dissertation focused on  Maria Messina's literary work, while in her Master's thesis, she worked on Clara Maffei's literary salon (1834-1886) and sociability in pre and post-Risorgimental Italy. She recently published her essay in the journal Italian Studies, “From Mater Dolorosa to Mater Degenerata: Sacrifice and Subversion in Deledda’s Cenere and Duse’s Film,”. Her interest in Italian political discourse and the intersectionality of gender, blackness, and Italian identity motivated other research projects, such as a co-authored article published in Forum Italicum, “Timira, romanzo meticcio e stratificato” which explores the complex issues of Italian identity in contemporary Italy through a postcolonial perspective. 

 

Publications

Bertossa, Michela (2024). “From Mater Dolorosa to Mater Degenerata: Sacrifice and Subversion in Deledda’s Cenere and Duse’s Film.” Italian Studies, 1–13 https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2024.2383902 

Bertossa, Michela, Gianangeli, Lawrence, Peretti Luca and Enrico Zammarchi, (2021). “Timira, romanzo meticcio e stratificato”. Forum Italicum, 55(1), 68–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014585820988509

 

Recent Conference Presentations, Invited Lectures, Interviews

“Disrupting the Narrative. Reimagining Motherhood in “The Good Mothers””, Graduate Students Association of Italian Studies Conference 2024, University of Toronto, November 2024

“Scandalous Mothers and Eugenic Fantasies in Negroni’s L’avvoltoio (1912)”. Panel organizer and presenter American Association for Italian Studies (AAIS) Annual Conference, Sorrento, Italy, June 2024 

“Donne Degeneri, Criminalizing Sex Work in Italian Women’s Writing (1865-1921)”. Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Convention, October 2023 

“From Mater dolorosa to Mater Degenerata: Anxiety, Nation, and Reproduction in Liberal Italy.” 2nd Symposium Interdisciplinary Network for Nineteenth-Century Italian Studies (INNCIS), March 2023

“Stories of Willful Girls in Post-war Italy: Videographic Essays on My Brilliant Friend”, 52nd Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Convention, March 2021 (Virtual)

Invited as guest speaker at the Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour at the University of New Hampshire in April 2024.

Guest lecture on the film Shun Li and the Poet (English) at OSU, Italian 2053: Italian Cinema  (Spring 2024)

Guest speaker at New York University for the Seminar “Italian Feminisms” by Prof. Joseph Perna. Presented: Donne e Madri Degeneri. Reproduction, Gender, and Class in Liberal Italy (1865-1922), April 2023

Interview with Will DiGravio on the videography essay on “My Brilliant Friend” for weekly newsletter Notes on Videographic Criticism https://thevideoessay.substack.com/p/volume-2-issue-5-rio-bravo-roast, 2021

 

Teaching 

Italian 2055: Mafia Movies (in English) (both Instructor of Record and Teaching Assistant)
Italian 2056: Love on the Italian Screen (in English) (Teaching Assistant)
Italian 2102: Contemporary Italian Society (Instructor of Record) 
Italian 5101: Intensive Italian (Instructor of Record)
Italian 1102: Beginning Italian II (Instructor of Record)
Italian 1101: Beginning Italian I (Instructor of Record)