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Scott, English Department chair, teaches and researches primarily in the areas of 19th-century American literature and cultural history and in popular culture.

The inseparability of literature and popular culture was cemented early for Scott, thanks to the small used book store where he spent countless hours at an early age. He brought home Twain, Verne, Huxley, and Orwell, as well as cheap science fiction paperbacks and comic books purchased 10-for-a-dollar. Since then, Scott has published scholarship on the 19th-century work of figures such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain and the painter William Sidney Mount. With Carmen Sarracino, he co-authored 鈥楾he Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go from Here鈥� (Beacon, 2008). The book explores how the United States has been adopting the ideology of power-oriented pornography in many of its social institutions. A personal highlight for Scott is the week the book was positively discussed by 麻豆传媒week, Ms. Magazine, Focus on the Family, and XBIZ the porn industry鈥檚 business news source.

His recent publication returned to his childhood interests in comics and graphic novels . In 2015, McFarland published his edited collection 鈥淢arvel Comics Civil War and the Age of Terror: Critical Essays on the Comic Saga.鈥� The essays investigate how Marvel鈥檚 鈥淐ivil War鈥� comic event responded to challenges to civil liberties following 9/11.

Scott received a bachelor鈥檚 degree in English from Ball State University, a master鈥檚 degree in English from Iowa State University and a doctorate in American Studies from Purdue University.

Allison Fagan is an associate professor in the English department where she teaches courses in Latinx Literature, the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border, African American literature, and contemporary U.S. literature. In the classroom and in her research, she focuses on questions of storytelling: whose stories are lifted and whose sidelined, and which stories—of the border, of the nation, of documented and undocumented subjects and citizens—resonate and which are revised. She is interested in the ways the archives and publishing histories of Latinx and African American writers can complicate the stories we tell ourselves about what counts as American literature. Her book, From the Edge: Chicana/o Border Literature and the Politics of Print (2016, Rutgers UP), shows how physical books carry within them the stories of their production, publication, and reception, documents of the storytelling itself.
She is the coordinator of the Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies minor and works with the Shenandoah Valley Scholars' Latino Initiative. 
She is from Chicago by way of Calumet City, Illinois, and she received a doctorate in literature from Loyola University Chicago in 2010 and a bachelor's degree in English from Saint Xavier University in Chicago in 2004. Before JMU, she worked at Indiana University Northwest.