Born in Canton, Ohio, Abel enrolled in forestry and wildlife management at Utah State University but went on to obtain an undergraduate degree in English.
[2][3] Recovering a neglected moment in French cultural history, these anthologies compiled a rich selection of nearly one hundered and fifty important texts, most of them never before available in English.
Drawing on extensive archival research, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914 (University of California Press, 1994) is an invaluable, richly detailed history of France's early world-wide prominence and is the fullest account in English.
Abel's most recent monograph, The Exhibitor as Producer: Stage Prologues in American Movies Theatres, 1917-1926 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) recovers the unique theatrical practice that usually preceded a feature film and sometimes even became the main attraction that strongly affected an audience's movie-going experience.
His books won the Theatre Library Association Award in 1985, 1995 and 2006 and the Jay Leyda Prize in Cinema Studies in 1989.
Among his scores of essays, the 1995 SCS Katherine Singer Kovács Award went to his article, “Pathé Goes to Town: French Films Create a Market for the Nickelodeon” Cinema Journal 35.1 (Fall 1995): 3-26; and the 2021 IAMHIST-Routledge Prize to “The Middleman of the Movies,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 41.1 (2021): 641-664."