Dr. Scallan has a Doctorate in Atlantic History from Florida International University. She also has a Master's in History from the University of Alabama, Huntsville; a Graduate Certificate in Museum Collections and Preservation Care from George Washington University; a Certificate in Women's Entrepreneurship from Cornell University; and a Bachelor's in History and Art History from the University of North Florida. Her areas of expertise include material and visual culture; gender and sexual identity; and the intersection of race and politics. Megan has presented at conferences in the United States and Europe, including the American Historical Association and the Bavarian American Academy.
Dr. Scallan’s research demonstrates the use of goods, objects, and buildings as historical evidence, especially how people buy, trade, and live daily life. Her work shows how objects and spaces help us understand the past. The research for her MA thesis and PhD dissertation investigate how patriotic imagery, symbols, and media shape political attitudes, influence public opinion, and cultivate collective consciousness. By analyzing how images are consumed and interpreted, she shows how individuals and communities forged and sustained a shared—often diffuse—sense of national identity across emerging regional differences, varied cultural traditions, and diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds.
Historic Preservation
From managing to restoring historic homes and properties in Alabama, Florida, and Massachusetts, I focus on maintaining the cultural integrity of our built environment, often bridging practical skills, historical knowledge, and community advocacy to preserve our built heritage. My work involves protecting and conserving historically significant buildings, sites, objects, and landscapes ensuring these tangible links to the past survive for future generations. Both my professional and academic background demonstrate I am expert in research, documentation, data management, and restoration as well as safeguarding local heritage by identifying historic sites, educating the public, and ensuring compliance with preservation laws, often through technical assistance and policy recommendations to city councils or boards.
Curator and Collections Manager
Throughout my museum career as a Curator and Collections Manager, I have developed and stewarded collections through the full lifecycle—from identification and evaluation to rights research, digitization, metadata, quality review, publication, and interpretive framing—so that materials are prepared and described for meaningful scholarly use. A core strength is partner-facing leadership grounded in professionalism, care, and clear communication. I have built and maintained relationships with libraries, archives, and individual contributors to secure participation, align expectations, and support responsible stewardship. I coordinate acquisition and rights documentation and am familiar with copyright, permissions, and rights research practices. Many of the exhibitions, public programs, tours, and publications I have worked on address artwork and stories typically underrepresented communities to highlight the relevance of these unheard perspectives, allowing my audiences to reflect on what they have seen in the galleries to their own lives. Over the years, I have worked on over 55 permanent collection exhibitions, traveling shows from other intuitions, and created exhibits featuring artwork from living artists. The most successful of these are thought-provoking, innovative, and educational; challenging how we interact with the past in the present and preserve those stories for future generations. I have also designed programs for K–12, undergraduate, and adult learners; developed primary source–based curricula; and facilitated dialogue around challenging histories with care and rigor.
Researcher
My academic and professional experiences have honed my ability to identify, evaluate, and contextualize primary sources, and to translate that analysis into clear, accurate description. I bring strong writing and editorial skills, including producing interpretive and contextual materials that support discovery, teaching, and research. I am deeply committed to expanding equitable access to primary sources and advancing inclusive, collaborative cultural heritage work. My research incorporates themes of themes of racial, gender, and social justice. In 2018 at the American Historical Association’s Annual Meeting, I presented a paper on Samuel Joseph May and other Unitarian ministers in Massachusetts and their involvement in the abolitionist movement. The abolitionist ministers discussed in this paper had to contend with opposition from proslavery advocates who argued for economic, national, and racial justifications for the slave trade and slavery which ultimately led to them losing their employment.
Dissertation Abstract
Historians have long known that the nineteenth-century United States witnessed significant innovation in printing technologies, but the implications of printing innovations for material culture have been less well understood. Improved printing, faster manufacturing of objects, and expanding shipping routes provided consumers with a wide array of options to express themselves and their opinions on important social and political issues of the time. Organized chronologically and thematically, this dissertation examines the methods and technologies of image-making on ceramics, scrimshaw, and stationery materials. Like galleries in a museum, each chapter features a discrete set of artifacts and puts their producers and consumers into historical context. The dissertation as a whole illuminates and questions the significant continuities in the patriotic imagery that adorned the artifacts.
Even though the items examined are categorized as expressions of “the nation,” they were not bound by geography. In many ways, image-making technologies of material objects are international in scope. The objects and illustrations used reflect historical biases due to what was preserved and limited provenance records. However, the lack of diverse representation did not mean a lack of diversity among the objects’ creators and owners. Women, African American, and other ethnic minorities also made, purchased, used, and gifted the types of items examined. Although the visual iconography of patriotism involved significant continuities over time, the material expressions of Columbia changed in significant ways, expanding beyond the geographic and socio-economic borders within which historians have typically understood it.
In the Classroom
As an educator, I prioritize inclusive, active-learning environments that are well managed and student-centered. I develop assignments that invite close reading and visual/material analysis; I use transparent rubrics and provide timely, formative feedback on essays and projects to support improvement over time. I also design accessible digital humanities experiences—collaborative annotation, digital curation, mapping, and data-informed inquiry—so students engage deeply with primary sources and build transferable skills. My experience at FIU—an institution serving over 56,000 undergraduates, with roughly 70% ESL and international students representing 122–143 countries—has prepared me to support a richly multicultural, multilingual student body and employ inclusive pedagogy that fosters belonging and achievement. Beyond the classroom, I mentor students in research methods and academic planning, and I enjoy collaborating with campus partners and cultural institutions to create experiential learning that connects course themes to archives, museums, and community events.
My professional experience of scholarly research and curatorial practice informs a unique classroom approach that emphasizes critical thinking, cultural analysis, and the interpretation of texts, images, and objects as historical evidence. I guide students to think like historians—pose precise questions, read sources closely, analyze qualitative and quantitative evidence, and communicate findings clearly to varied audiences. I also aim to bring more digital humanities into the classroom and my scholarly practice, using DH to enrich teaching, streamline scholarly workflows, rethink boundaries between STEM and the humanities, and generate new ideas for what to research and how to pursue that research, while connecting students to the diverse, cross-disciplinary scholarly communities that DH fosters. For example, students examine transatlantic ship manifests and demographic datasets to investigate migration and enslavement, visualize routes with GIS, and present results through research posters or micro-exhibits. These methods build critical thinking, data literacy, and strong written and oral communication
Commitment to Diversity
Throughout my museum career, I have had a genuine commitment to serving and representing diverse people, histories, and artwork. I started in museum education at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens working closely with the Weaver Family Foundation Fund’s “Cummer in the Classroom” program which specially brings art education to elementary schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families in North Florida. I also served as a tour guide and art instructor for several programs for visitors with low vision, including “Touch Tours” and “Women of Vison.” For the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, I was an art camp instructor for the Rainbow Artists, an art education initiative for children with autism spectrum. As the Director of the Weeden House Museum, we incorporated more stories about the enslaved people featured in Maria Howard Weeden’s artist and poetry and started an ongoing relationship with Alabama A&M, a public historically black, land-grant university in North Alabama. While working on my PhD in Atlantic History, I taught at Florida International University, one of the second largest Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the United States and worked intimately with two museums in historically black neighborhoods recording oral histories and preserving/digitizing photographs, objects, and archival materials for public access.
