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; and the photographic nude.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS: “En-dehors de l’art. La Découverte de la photographie populaire, 1890-1936,” Etudes photographiques (May 2005); “‘Des fragments d’universalité mentalement digérés en forme de femme’:Alfred Stieglitz et le nu feminin,” La Revue du Musée d’Orsay, Autumn, 2004, 78-92; “Talbot's Rouen Window: Romanticism, Naturphilosophie, and the Invention of Photography," History of Photography 26, no. 2 (Summer 2002):124-131; "Edward Steichen: Artist, Impresario, Friend," and "Auguste Rodin, 1908 and 1910: The Eternal Feminine." In Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries, eds. Sarah Greenough and Charles Brock, 55-69, 70-81, 488-94. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001;"Les réalismes et ses détracteurs." In Paris en 3D: de la stéréoscopie à la réalité virtuelle, 1850-2000, 23-29. Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 2000. [Also English edition]