Director and Staff

Director: Catherine Portuges is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies. She also serves on the Five College Film Council, consisting of film studies representatives from Amherst, Smith, Hampshire and Mount Holyoke Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She teaches courses in French and East European cinemas; cinema and psyche; and autobiographical film. Professor Portuges has published widely on contemporary European cinema; national cinemas; and women directors. Her most recent book is Screen Memories: The Hungarian Cinema of Marta Meszaros (Indiana University Press, 1993).
email: portuges@complit.umass.edu
phone: (413) 545-3659

Academic Advisor: Nancy Inouye, is finishing her Ph.D. in the Communication Department at UMass. Her interests include postcolonial theory, issues of identity, nationalism, gender and sexuality, and of course film.
email: film@hfa.umass.edu 
phone: (413) 545-3659

Part Time Secretary: Alice V. Bishko
email: avb@hfa.umass.edu
phone: (413) 545-5807, voice mail: 577-2315

Student Staff: Rachel Appel, Michael Aronson, Hannah Jurist-Schoen, Lise Lawrence, Jian Lin, Undréa Steele

Core Faculty

Carolyn Anderson is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication. Her areas of specialization include documentary film; media historiography; film- television genre theory and criticism; and the cinema of the 1960s. Her publications include Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (co-authored with Thomas W. Benson, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), and Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies (co-authored with Benson, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).
email: anderson@comm.umass.edu
(413) 545-3455

Barton Byg is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures where he teaches "German Cinema: From Berlin to Hollywood"; "Fascism and Film: Propaganda, Resistance, Memory"; and "The East German Cinema." His book, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, has recently been published by the University of California Press. In January 1996 he taught a summer school course on German cinema and national identity at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and is directing an NEH summer institute on "Post Wall Germany" this summer. He is director of the DEFA Film Library Project, the only collection of East German film in North America, based at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
email: byg@german.umass.edu
(413) 545-6671

Anne Ciecko is Assistant Professor of Film in the Communication Department. Her interests include British film studies, gender in film, women filmmakers, and Hong Kong film. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh and has taught a wide number of courses in addition to designing various film series. 
e-mail: ciecko@comm.umass.edu
(413) 545-6348

Laszlo Dienes is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures in the Comparative Literature Department. He regularly teaches "Russia in Film" and "Russian and Soviet Culture." He has published Russian Literature in Exile: The Life and Work of Gajto Gazdanov (Otto Sagner Publishers, Munich, 1982). His recent scholarly work focuses on the writing and cinema of East European emigre artists.
email: dienes@complit.umass.edu
(413) 545-5618

Susan Jahoda is Professor in the Art Department, where she teaches photography, feminist and critical theory. She is the arts editor for Rethinking Marxism and an interdisciplinary artist/author whose work includes performance, installation, images/text, and photography. She has been the recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work has been exhibited and published widely in both Europe and North America. She is currently working on a book of images and texts called Frictional Contacts and Other Stories.
email: sej@art.umass.edu
(413) 545-6941

Don Eric Levine, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, teaches a variety of film courses in the Department of Comparative Literature, including Avant-Garde Film, International Film Noir, Fassbinder and Godard, and Gay(ze) in Cinema. He is also advisor for the film analysis track in the Comparative Literature program.
(413) 545-5810

Martin Norden is Professor of Film Studies in the Communication Department. His teaching interests are in the areas of film history/theory/criticism and screenwriting. He has published more than sixty articles and reviews in such journals as Wide Angle, Journal of Popular Film and Television , Film Criticism, Film & History, and Paradoxa , and in numerous anthologies. A Spanish translation of his book, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (Rutgers, 1994), was published by Fundacion ONCE in 1998. He is also the author of John Barrymore: A Bio-Bibliography (Greenwood, 1995) and the book review editor for the Journal of Popular Film and Television . 
email: norden@comm.umass.edu
(413) 545-0598
Click here for Professor Norden's web site.

Jacqueline Urla is Associate Professor of Anthropology with special interests in ethnographic film and indigenous media. She conducts research on minority politics, social movements, and the semiotics of resistance, and is the co-editor of Deviant Bodies (Indiana University Press, 1996). The recipient of a Getty Senior Research Grant, she worked on a two-year collaborative research project exploring the representation of whiteness in native peoples' art, material culture, and visual media. In 1993, she curated the film festival, "The Shock of Re-Cognition: Identity, Memory, and the Politics of Representation in Indigenous Media," with funding from the Getty Foundation and the University of Massachusetts Arts Council.
email: jurla@anthro.umass.edu
(413) 545-2869

Patrick Mensah  is an Associate Professor in the French Department at the University.  His Ph.D. was accomplished at Cornell University studying:  Enlightenment studies, critical theory, cultural theory, and post-colonial discourses.
email: pmensah@frital.umass.edu
413-545-6716

Bruce Geisler

Adjunct Faculty

Jennifer Stone, Associate Professor. Freudian psychoanalytic theory in relation to contemporary French, Italian, Italian-America, and Italian Jewish culture, literature, and film. Books and e-Books include: Pirandello's Naked Prompt (Ravenna 1989); Italian Freud; Freud's Jewish Body Ego {forthcoming] et al. Founding and contributing editorships include: Pirandello Studies; American Imago; javari.com.
(413) 545-2314