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".

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.

[10] 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),[11] “Buying Me Love: 1980s Class-Clash Teen Romances” (The Journal of Popular Culture),[12] 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.

[17] Shary authored a book-length study of the 2014 Richard Linklater film Boyhood (part of the Routledge series Cinema and Youth Cultures),[18] which was published in 2017.

He recently co-edited another collection in the ReFocus series with Frances Smith, on the films of John Hughes, and edited Cinemas of Boyhood: Masculinity, Sexuality, Nationality, both in 2021.