FACULTY
PROGRAM DIRECTOR
Catherine Portuges
Catherine Portuges is Professor of Comparative Literature/LLC, Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies, and Curator of the annual Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival.
She lectures, curates and consults widely on European and international cinema; she is a regular delegate to the Toronto International Film Festival and the annual Hungarian Film Week in Budapest, and guest curator for the Hungarian Cultural Center in London. Professor Portuges has programmed and designed film series, seminars and screenings for the Embassy of the Republic of Hungary in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, D.C), the Museum of Jewish Heritage (New York), the Open Society Archives/Central European University (Budapest), La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris), The Film Society of Lincoln Center (New York) and The Barbican (London).
She is the author of Screen Memories: the Hungarian Cinema of Márta Mészáros (Indiana 1993), editor of “New Perspectives on Hungarian Cinema” (www.kinokultura.com 2008) and co-editor of Cinemas in Transition: Post-communism in East-Central Europe (Temple Press, 2011). Her essays have appeared in Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Loss in European Cinema, Structures et Pouvoirs des Imaginaires, Caméra Politique: Cinéma et Stalinisme; East European Cinemas (Routledge, 2005), The Cinema of Central Europe (Wallflower, 2005). She is a contributor to and editorial board member of Studies in Eastern European Cinemas, Studies in Hungarian Cinema, Cineaste, The Moving Image, and Slavic Review. In 2009, she was awarded the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal by the Republic of Hungary for her contributions to cinema and, in 2010, she received the Chancellor's Medal for distinguished faculty from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
email: portuges@complit.umass.edu
phone:
(413)
545-3659
CORE FACULTY
Barton Byg
Barton Byg is Professor in German & Scandinavian Studies, where his teaching focuses on German and international cinema. Research interests include documentary, culture of the Cold War, and memory culture. As a Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor from 2005 to 2008, he taught courses at Hampshire and Smith Colleges—on Brecht and world cinema, landscape and cinema, and color. He is currently teaching a new course on early Scandinavian Cinema with visiting professor Louise Wallenberg, film scholar and director of the Center for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University. He is author of the book Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (University of California Press, 1995), and is founding director of the DEFA Film Library, the only archive, distributor and study center outside Europe devoted to East German film and related works (www.umass.edu/defa).
byg@german.umass.edu
(413) 545-6671
Anne Ciecko
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.
ciecko@comm.umass.edu
(413)
545-6348
Laszlo Dienes
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.
dienes@complit.umass.edu
(413)
545-5618
Bruce Geisler
Bruce Geisler is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication, where he teaches video production, screenwriting, and documentary filmmaking. He is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker whose recent feature length documentary, Free Spirits, played in movie theaters and film festivals nationally. He earned an MFA in film production and screenwriting from the film school at the University of Southern California.
geisler@comm.umass.edu
(413) 545-4758
Susan Jahoda
Susan Jahoda works in a range of genres including video, sound, photography, text, performance, and installation. Her works have been exhibited widely, including venues in London, Paris, Venice, Basel, Seoul, Russia, Rome, and New York. Additionally, she has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and The Trust for Mutual Understanding. Jahoda has co-curated a number of exhibitions and screenings including Martha Rosler Library, an E-flux project in collaboration with Martha Rosler and Beyond the Instance of an Ending, (2009), Setting in Motion (2006), and Global Priority (2002), with the intent of bringing together a varied group of international individuals engaged in critical artistic practice. She has also published short stories and essays including “Spring Flowers,” in Class and its Others, University of Minnesota Press, (2000) and “Theatres of Madness,” in Deviant Bodies, Indiana University Press, (1995). In 1993 Jahoda began serving as the arts editor for the journal Rethinking Marxism, a position that has enabled her to collaborate with other artists and writers on numerous projects.
sej@art.umass.edu
(413)
545-6941
Don Eric Levine
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
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 .
norden@comm.umass.edu
(413)
545-0598
Professor Norden's website
Demetria Shabazz
Demetria Rougeaux Shabazz, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of Alabama), teaches in the Department of Communication at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is currently working on a manuscript that looks at the production and signification of African American female stars in film and television during the 1960s. Her essay “Birth through Conflict: TV Responds to the Politics of Race in 1968,” appears in the anthology America Viewed and Skewed: Television Situation Comedies (SUNY Press, October 2005). Her teaching and research interests include filmic and television production practices and the construction of identity, African filmmaking and aesthetic practices, African American women in situation-comedy and reality television, democracy and community media, underrepresented communities in mainstream media, digital storytelling.
dshabazz@comm.umass.edu
(413) 545-5770
Shawn Shimpach
Shawn Shimpach is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department whose work includes cinema studies, television studies, media and cultural studies, the cultural history of entertainment and significance of popular culture.
shimpach@comm.umass.edu
(413) 545-2341
Jonathan Skolnik
Jonathan Skolnik is Assistant Professor of German and adjunct faculty for History and for Judaic & Near Eastern Studies. His interests include German-Jewish literature and culture, 19th- and 20th-century literature, exile film, intellectual history. He has published articles on the films of Edgar Ulmer, Fritz Lang, and Grigori Roshal.
jskolnik@german.umass.edu
(413) 545-4245
Jacqueline Urla
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.
jurla@anthro.umass.edu
(413)
545-2869
Barbara Zecchi
Barbara Zecchi is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese. Her publications include La mujer entre teoría y práctica cinematográfica (in progress); La mujer en la España actual:¿evolución o involución? (coeditor with Jacqueline Cruz, 2004); Sexualidad y Escritura (1850-2000 ) (coeditor with Raquel Medina, 2003); Annotated edition of Benito Pérez Galdós El amigo Manso (coeditor with José Monleón, 2002); and about thirty articles on 19th and 20th century Spanish Narrative, Women Writers, Gender and Film Studies. Her interests include Film Studies, Feminist Theory, 19th and 20th Century Spanish Narrative.
bzecchi@spanport.umass.edu
(413) 545-4910
Emeritus Faculty
Carolyn Anderson
Carolyn Anderson, in the Department of Communication, specializes in 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).
anderson@comm.umass.edu
(413)
545-3455
