Photo credit: Justin Baker-Rojas
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ABOUT Cara
Cara Finnegan is a writer, teacher, and historian of photography. Her books and essays explore the role of photography as a tool for public life. Her most recent book is Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital (University of Illinois Press). Research on the project was supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her current project, Bighearted, is a work of creative non-fiction. The book combines elements of memoir with historical research and archival speculation to tell an intimate story about the impact of rheumatic heart disease on her family and their community in 1930s Minnesota. Finnegan's ideas about photography have been featured in a variety of publications in the fields of Communication and U.S. History, as well as in popular media outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, and Vox. She is also an editor-at-large at Reading the Pictures, a non-profit dedicated to the promotion of news media literacy. Since 2018, Finnegan and Reading the Pictures publisher Michael Shaw have co-hosted Chatting the Pictures, a webcast analyzing key news photos of the week. A native of Saint Paul, Minnesota, Finnegan received her B.A. from the University of St. Thomas, her M.A. from the University of Maine, and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She is a Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she has worked since 1999. Finnegan was named a University Scholar in 2017 and holds affiliated appointments in Art History, Gender and Women's Studies, the Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Center for Writing Studies. Finnegan is also a certified book coach who works with academics who want to write fiction and memoir. Cara shares her ideas about creative writing of all kinds (fiction, memoir, non-fiction, scholarly) at her free newsletter, Finnegan's Take. Download a full, current CV. Access Finnegan's Google Scholar profile. Contact at [email protected]. |