Rate My Professor Catherine Fowler

Professor Catherine Fowler holds a BA (Hons) from Bulmershe College and a PhD from the University of Warwick (1995) titled The films of Chantal Akerman: a cinema of displacements. She began her academic career as a lecturer in Film Studies at Southampton Institute of Higher Education from 1994 to 2004, leading the BA (Hons) Film Studies programme, achieving promotion to Reader in Research in 2001, and developing and leading the MA in Independent Film and Filmmaking. She served as Screen correspondent for the Créteil International Women's Film Festival from 1992 to 1998 and has been a member of the editorial advisory committee for Vertigo magazine. At the University of Otago's Media, Film and Communication programme in the Division of Humanities, she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014, full Professor in 2022, and delivered her Inaugural Professorial Lecture in 2023.

Her research focuses on historical and contemporary world cinema, expanding critical frameworks for women, independent, Belgian, and Jewish filmmakers; contradictions within national cinema and independent practices; the film-art nexus, notably gallery films that interrogate narrative, time, and spectatorship; and representations of rural space, place, and identity in films. Expertise spans feminism and film, European cinema, art cinema, and experimental cinema. Major publications include the monograph Sally Potter (University of Illinois Press, 2008), the first book-length analysis of the filmmaker's integration of song, dance, performance, and poetry; Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Bloomsbury, 2013); edited The European Cinema Reader (Routledge, 2002); co-edited Representing the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in Films about the Land (Wayne State University Press, 2006) and Epistolary Entanglements in Film, Media and the Visual Arts (Amsterdam University Press, 2023). Recent outputs encompass the audiovisual essay "On being 'with' normal people" (NECSUS, 2024) and articles such as "Pressing back with Jenni Hermoso: Understanding the non-consensual kiss as abusive" (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2025). Honors include a Fulbright Scholarship for visits to UCLA, Yale, and Harvard to explore video art, and runner-up for the 2014 BAFTSS best article prize for "Remembering Cinema ‘elsewhere’: From Retrospection to Introspection in the Gallery Film".