Michaela Esposito

Michaela Esposito is a fourth-year History major and European Studies minor from the Bay Area. Her departmental honors thesis focuses on the Jewish experience in Fascist Italy, exploring the complex internment camp and Displaced Persons (DP) camp systems in the southern region of the country. Michaela’s research seeks to challenge the popular belief that Italians had limited, or even nonexistent, participation in the persecution of Jewry during the Holocaust under Benito Mussolini’s reign. She is primarily analyzing the histories of the Ferramonti internment camp and the Santa Maria al Bagno DP camp, which were critical sites of both persecution and post-war rehabilitation for Jewish refugees. Michaela is also an Undergraduate Research Fellow at the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and most recently, she was published in a research report on the evolution of the Fairfax District in Los Angeles by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. In her free time, Michaela enjoys traveling and going to concerts, and after graduating, hopes to eventually pursue a PhD in History.