Will Scheibel received a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from Indiana University Bloomington, where he completed a program of study in film and media, and he has taught at Syracuse University since 2015. As associate professor in the Department of English, he works in the Film and Screen Studies track and serves on the advising faculty for the Goldring Arts Journalism and Communications program.

In his research and writing, he often focuses on Hollywood cinema between the 1930s and 1960s, or the “classical” studio period, and considers how legendary figures in film history (filmmakers, stars, proprietary characters) achieve legibility as classic-film icons. For example, his monograph Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front (Wayne State University Press, 2022) is about the actress most famous for the classic film noir Laura (1944), who rose to the ranks of Twentieth Century-Fox's major stars during World War II and the immediate postwar years as "the most beautiful woman in movie history" before leaving Hollywood to undergo psychiatric treatment in the 1950s. Other books have come out of his secondary interest in popular culture and media more generally. With Julie Grossman, he co-wrote the “TV Milestones” volume Twin Peaks (Wayne State University Press, 2020) and co-edited the collection Penny Dreadful and Adaptation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He is also a staff writer for Film Obsessive.

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Currently, he is beginning a new book titled Monsters in the Movie Lab: Universal Pictures and Classic Hollywood Horror. This project looks at the canonical formation of what would become known as the Universal Classic Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Wolf Man, etc.), from their origins in the serialized films that made Universal Pictures synonymous with the horror genre, to the circulation of Universal horror films on television and home video, to their status in the franchise era as brand ambassadors for a media conglomerate.

Film and Screen Studies

Popular cinema, media, and culture from the United States; genres and modes of screen-based narrative (film noir, horror, melodrama); stardom and acting; director styles and reputations; gender studies; modernism and modernity.

Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, Syracuse University, Spring 2021.