Timothy Shary

Timothy Shary (born August 17, 1967) is an American film scholar. He has been a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Clark University, and the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (2002) and Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen (2005) and the coeditor with Alexandra Seibel of Youth Culture in Global Cinema (2007). He has more recently edited Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema (2013) and published a new edition of Generation Multiplex with the subtitle The Image of Youth in American Cinema Since 1980 (2014).
Shary's primary research has focused on the representational politics of age and gender, and has been published in many anthologies. His essays and reviews have also appeared in journals such as Men and Masculinities, Film Quarterly, Sight & Sound, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Wide Angle, and The Journal of Popular Culture.

Shary earned his B.A. degree in 1991 at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where his work focused on cinema studies. His Division III project (a thesis written for graduation) examined voyeurism in Alfred Hitchcock's films, and he also wrote "A History of Student Activities and Achievements at Hampshire College". Shary went on to earn an M.A. in Film Scholarship at Ohio University in 1992, where his thesis was entitled The Present Personal Truth: Three Properties of Video and Their Effect on the Reception of Contemporary Narrative Cinema. Much of that thesis was published in two journal articles: “Present Personal Truths: The Alternative Phenomenology of Video in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing” and “Video as Accessible Artifact and Artificial Access: The Early Films of Atom Egoyan”.

In 1998, Shary earned his Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Massachusetts, with a dissertation entitled Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in American Cinema, 1981-1996. This study would be the foundation for his first book in 2002.

As Shary completed his doctoral studies and began teaching at Clark University, he published articles and reviews such as "The Teen Film and its Methods of Study" (Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 25, #1; spring 1997, pp. 38-45), "Reification and Loss in Postmodern Puberty: The Cultural Logic of Fredric Jameson and Young Adult Movies" (Postmodernism in the Cinema, ed. Cristina Degli Esposti, Berghan Books, 1999), and "Film Genres and the Cinematic Image of Youth– A College Course File" (Journal of Film and Video, vol. 55, #1, spring 2003, pp. 39-57).

Shary had argued for the legitimacy of teen movies as a codified and potent American film genre throughout his early work, as evident in his anthologized essay “Teen Films: The Cinematic Image of Youth”, first published in Film Genre Reader III (ed. Barry Keith Grant) in 2003 and again in the fourth edition of 2012. He also began specific studies of gender representation and youth with articles such as “The Nerdly Girl and Her Beautiful Sister: Torments of Intelligence for Teen Movie Girls” (Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood, ed. Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance, Wayne State, 2002, pp. 235-250) and “Bad Boys and Hollywood Hype: Gendered Conflicts in Juvenile Delinquency Depictions” (Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, ed. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, Wayne State, 2004, pp. 21-40). His work on gender continued in studies of youth cinema such as “Virgin Springs: A Survey of Teen Films' Quest for Sexcess” (Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, ed. Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Wayne State, 2010, pp. 54-67), “Buying Me Love: 1980s Class-Clash Teen Romances” (The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 44, #3, June 2011, pp. 563-582), and “‘The only place to go is inside’: Confusions about Sexuality and Class from Kids to Superbad”, which has been published in numerous editions of Popping Culture since 1996 (ed. Murray Pomerance and John Sakeris, Pearson Education, 2013 (7th ed.), pp. 5-13).

His ongoing interests in teen movies and feminist film have continued with the collection The Films of Amy Heckerling (director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Clueless, Loser, I Could Never Be Your Woman), which he co-edited with Frances Smith as part of the ReFocus series by the University of Edinburgh Press in 2016.

He edited the collection Millennial Masculinity in 2013, based on his wider interests in gender on screen.

In recent years, Shary has turned his attention to the latter polarity of life, with studies of older characters in American cinema. His first publication of this research was “The Politics of Aging in the May-December Romance Plot” (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 31, #7, July 2014, pp. 669-678). He has since presented research on the topic at numerous conferences, and completed a new book with Nancy McVittie, Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema, which was published by the University of Texas Press in September, 2016.

Shary has presented his research at dozens of academic conferences since 1992, including the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Popular Culture Association, and the University Film and Video Association.

The Ohio University College of Fine Arts awarded him its Distinguished Alumni of the Year honor from its School of Film in 2004.

As a professor at Clark University, Shary was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 2004, and Outstanding Advisor of the Year in 2006.

Shary gave the featured interview in the Independent Film Channel documentary Indie Sex: Teens (2007). He has done numerous radio and television interviews.

Shary was a delegate to the inaugural Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2008.

He has been interviewed for features in The Washington Post, The Observer (London), Cleveland Plain Dealer, Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Newhouse News Service, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, Boston Globe, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications.