Michela Bertossa is a Ph.D. student,  Teaching Assistant in Italian, at the Department of French and Italian at the Ohio State University. She is a Distinguished University Fellow in Italian Studies. 

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. At The Ohio State University, she is currently working on her dissertation tentatively 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.