Professor McCauley is a specialist in the history of photography and nineteenth-century French visual culture. She is particularly interested in the sociology of art and the formation of networks of elite patronage, criticism, and marketing during the modern period. She is also concerned with the ways that photography and changing photographic technologies responded to and in turn shaped discourses on scientific objectivity, subjecthood, and originality. She is the author of A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph; Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris,1848-1871; The Museum and the Photograph (co-authored with Mark Haworth-Booth), as well as numerous studies on the historiography of photography, the cultural contexts of the medium's invention, and the careers of Thomas Eakins, the Aguado brothers, and the Bisson frères, among others. Her current research projects include a study of American photography and the First World War, and an investigation of the impact of the medium on the development of art history as a discipline. She recently co-curated an exhibition on Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice and was a co-author of the catalogue, Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004). At Princeton, she has taught seminars on the Stieglitz circle; the invention of photography; American museum history and theory; photography and World War I; the photographic nude photography during the collodion era, and French and British caricature from 1776 to 1914.

Recent Publications:

The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz (co-authored with Jason Francisco) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

“Sneak Previews: Nude Photographs by Pierre Bonnard and George Henrik Breitner.” In Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard, ed. Elizabeth Easton, 46-57 (Yale University Press, 2011).

“Epouses des hommes et épouses de l’art: la ‘question de la femme’ dans les années 1860 et la photographie de Julia Margaret Cameron”/“Brides of Men and Brides of Art: The ‘Woman Question’ of the 1860s and the Photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron,” Etudes photographiques (November 2011): 7-50 (French); 51-75 (English).

“Fawning over Marbles: Robert and Gerardine Macpherson’s Vatican Sculptures and the Role of Photographs in the Reception of the Antique.” In Art and the Early Photographic Album, ed. Stephen Bann, 94-122 (Yale University Press, CASVA Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 77, 2011).

“Francis Bruguiere and Lance Sieveking’s Beyond This Point (1929): An Experiment in Abstract Photography, Synaesthesia, and the Cinematic Book.” In More Than One: Photographs in Sequence, ed. Joel Smith, 46-65 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

“`Merely Mechanical’: On the Origins of Photographic Copyright in France and England,” Art History (February 2008): 57-78.

“Overexposure: Thoughts on the Triumph of Photography.” In The Meaning of Photography, Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, eds., 159-162.(New Haven: Yale UP, 2008).

“The Trouble with Photography.” In Photography Theory . ed. James Elkins, 403-30 (London: Routledge, 2007).