Catherine Portuges is Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies, Curator of the annual Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival, and served as Graduate Program Director in Comparative Literature from 1995-2009. She was awarded the Chancellor's Medal for Distinguished Teaching (2010), the Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal (Republic of Hungary, 2009) for her contributions to Hungarian cinema, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2007). Her research interests include Central European and post-communist national cinemas; French and Francophone cinema; memory and Jewish identity; European minorities, migration, and gender; and cinematic representations of the city. Her books include Screen Memories: the Hungarian Cinema of Márta Mészáros (Indiana, 1993) and Cinemas in Transition: Post-socialist East Central Europe (co-edited with Peter Hames, Temple, 2012), and Gendered Subjects (1985, re-issued by Routledge, 2012). Her recent essays have appeared in Cinema's Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács (2012); The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe (2012); Blackwell Companion to East European Cinema (2012); and Blackwell Companion to Historical Film (2012); Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies (2011); Projected Shadows: Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Representation of Loss in European Cinema (2009); Texte, Image, Imaginaire (2007), Caméra Politique: Cinéma et Stalinisme (2005); East European Cinemas (2005); and 24 Frames: Central Europe (2005).


She teaches French Film, Cinema and Psyche, and the Dissertation Research Seminar, and is a frequent lecturer at international conferences, an invited programmer, curator, juror and consultant for film festivals and colloquia, and a delegate to international film festivals. She serves on the editorial board of Studies in Eastern European Cinema (UK), Jewish Film and New Media: an International Journal, and AHEA: E-Journal of the American Hungarian Educational Association, and is a member of the Academic Advisory Board, Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies and Consultant for Eastern Europe, European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (UK).