Assistant
Professor
English Department, St. John's College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences
Queens Campus
St. John Hall, B-40
(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.