Assistant Professor
English Department
St. John's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
St. John Hall, Room B-40
Queens Campus
(718) 990-5621
combss@stjohns.edu
Educational Background
B.A., 1998, The University of Chicago, Cinema and Media
Studies
M.A., 2001, University of California, Berkeley, Rhetoric and
Film
Ph.D. 2006, University of California, Berkeley, Rhetoric and
Film
Profile
Scott Combs began teaching at St. John’s in the fall of
2007. He received his B.A. in Cinema and Media Studies with
Honors from the University of Chicago in 1998, and his M.A. (2001)
and Ph.D. (2006) from the University of California, Berkeley.
In the year prior to joining the St. John’s faculty, Professor
Combs taught at Berkeley and Stanford University. He teaches
undergraduate and graduate courses on international film history,
American film genres (noir, melodrama, horror, westerns),
novel-to-film adaptation, and death, dying, and modern
medicine. His research has focused primarily on the cinematic
nature of death both on and off the screen. He is currently
preparing a book manuscript on the ways American cinema sees dying,
tracing film death across a range of technological innovation, from
the coming of story films, to early synchronized sound, to the
medical use of body imaging devices. Recently he has begun
researching the political formation of the white rural poor as a
category of denigration in popular culture. He is also a
published poet under the pseudonym Harlan Mackey.