Cara A. Finnegan

Cara Finnegan studies the role of photography in U.S. public life. She is Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches and does research in the history of photography, rhetoric, media, and political communication. Her current book project, American Presidents and the History of Photography from the Daguerreotype to the Digital Revolution, was featured at the 2015 Chicago Humanities Festival and supported by a 2016-17 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her last book, Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression (University of Illinois Press, 2015), won the 2016 Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address from the National Communication Association. She is also the author of the award-winning Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Smithsonian, 2003). Finnegan's ideas about photography have been featured in a variety of publications in the fields of Communication and American History, as well as in popular media outlets such as CBS, Chicago Public Radio, USA Today, and Reuters. Finnegan regularly moderates the Reading the Pictures Salon, a real-time, online discussion where photojournalists, political commentators, and academics explore how photography is used to frame contemporary social and political issues. A native of St. Paul, Minnesota, Finnegan received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and has worked at the University of Illinois since 1999.

Sub-specialties: History of photography, documentary, poverty, presidential photography, New Deal-era arts and culture, child labor imagery, the politics of art, historical and contemporary photojournalism, the rise of digital photography, the role of photography in social media.