1. Education

2. Published works

3. Recognition

4. References

Timothy Shary (born August 17, 1967) is an American film scholar, and a leading authority on the representation of youth in movies.^[1] 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)^[2] and Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen (2005)^[3] and the co-editor with Alexandra Seibel of Youth Culture in Global Cinema (2007).^[4] He edited Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema (2013)^[5] and in 2014 published a new edition of Generation Multiplex with the subtitle The Image of Youth in American Cinema Since 1980.^[6] In 2016, Shary co-edited a collection on filmmaker Amy Heckerling^[7] with Frances Smith, and co-authored Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema^[8] with Nancy McVittie. He most recently wrote a book-length study of Richard Linklater's 2014 classic Boyhood^[9] in 2017.

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.

Education

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".^[10] 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”^[11] and “Video as Accessible Artifact and Artificial Access: The Early Films of Atom Egoyan”.^[12]

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.

Published works

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),^[13] "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),^[14] 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).^[15]

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.^[16] 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)^[17] 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).^[18] 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),^[19] “Buying Me Love: 1980s Class-Clash Teen Romances” (The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 44, #3, June 2011, pp. 563–582),^[20] 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).^[21]

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.^[7]

He edited the collection Millennial Masculinity in 2013, based on his wider interests in gender on screen.^[22]

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).^[23] 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.^[24]

Shary's most recent book is a study of the 2014 Richard Linklater film Boyhood (part of the Routledge series Cinema and Youth Cultures),^[9] which was published in 2017. He is now co-editing another collection in the ReFocus series with Frances Smith, on the films of John Hughes, which is scheduled for publication in 2019.

Recognition

The Ohio University College of Fine Arts awarded Shary its Distinguished Alumni of the Year honor from its School of Film in 2004.^[25]

Shary gave the featured interview in the Independent Film Channel documentary Indie Sex: Teens (2007).^[26]{{better source|date=August 2018}}

Shary was a delegate to the inaugural Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2008.^[27]

In December 2016, Shary was invited to present four American teen films in a series entitled The Tender Age, organized by the Russian publishing house Séance at the Rodina Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia.^[28] While in attendance, he presented a lecture for the first class of the St. Petersburg School of New Cinema entitled "Adolescence on the Outskirts: The Liminal Nature of Youth in American Teen Cinema.”^[29]

References

• World-Tortoise
• World tour
• World Tour (Bananarama)
• World Tour (disambiguation)
• World Tour EP
• World Tour E.P.
• World tourism index
• World tourism ranking
• World Tourism rankings
• World Tourism Rankings
• World tourism statistics and rankings
• World Tour (Mary J. Blige)
• World Tour of the Century
• World Tour Soccer 06
• World Tour (song)
• World Tour Tennis
• World Tour (Wale song)
• World town planning day
• WorldTracer
• World Track Cycling Championships
• World trade
• World trade building 7
• World Trade Center 1993 bombings
• World Trade Center Abu Dhabi
• World Trade Center (Amsterdam)