College of Arts and Sciences

Assistant Professor
Phone: (239)590-7427
E-Mail: mmcshane@fgcu.edu
Office: MOD 1 - #31

Megan C. McShane is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Florida. Her research interests include art and ecology, as well as art and technology, digital media, and French art of the inter-war period. Her dissertation, Exquisite Corpse: The Practice of Surrealist Collective Drawing, 1925-1941, received the President's Award for Writing on Women's Issues at Emory University in 2004 upon graduation. While at Emory, she held a fellowship in the Violence Studies Program, where she developed courses on the Visual Rhetoric of Violence, using models of systems theory as opposed to traditional vector theory, believing that violence is related to ingrained cultural paradigms of instrumental thinking and an ethos of efficiency in post-industrial society.  She has been a Center for Advanced Studies Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  

In her current teaching post at FGCU, she is working with The Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education, to further her work on the art and ecology movement, which is informed by conceptions of time as interrelated with technology. She also is an affiliate of the Whitaker Center for Science, a nationally recognized S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education leadership center.  Previously, she worked with the University of Notre Dame's  John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, a center that is committed to promoting research on science and technology as human, knowledge producing institutions. She seeks to study the variety of ways in which these institutions affect society, and this from the perspective of art history.  Her master's thesis addressed large scale waste-management infrastructure projects using artist and scientist collaborations for bioremediation.

She recently spent a year in China as the first Modern Art Historian to be officially accepted by the People's Republic of China and the Ministry of Education to propagate Avant-Garde art history and methodology. Her Fulbright was endowed by the Luce Foundation. She was posted at Sun Yat-Sen University in the Department of History in Guangzhou. While in Guangzhou she studied narrative in new media art and the democratization of digital video productions in China with reference to satellite, landscape, and cell phone images. She has exported Chinese Contemporary video art to the Munich Film Museum and the Hirshorn Museum at the Smithsonian.  

Her book, Ecological Mimesis, issued in November 2008 (ISBN: 978-0-9790786-4-4), considers the concepts of adaptation and mutation, biological mimesis, natural specimen display, mimetic representation in the fine arts, and the social implications of surveillance technology employing technology modeled after insects and cephalopods.  

McShane has worked to gather artists from four continents to produce art installations on shorelines and islands in the South China Sea on the Shenzhen and Hong Kong borders, providing the first major art exhibition in China that concerns principles of Art and Ecology, sponsored by the People's Ministry of Culture and the China Cup sailing Regatta.