Cara Finnegan is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

:: Contact Information
172 Lincoln Hall | MC-456
217-333-1855
caraf@uiuc.edu

:: Biographical Statement
Professor Cara Finnegan (Ph.D. Northwestern) teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetorical criticism, gender and rhetoric, contemporary rhetorical theory, public sphere theory, and visual rhetoric. She is the author of Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Smithsonian Books, 2003), which won the National Communication Association's Diamond Anniversary Book Award in 2004. Finnegan is also co-editor of Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture, which will be published by Sage in 2008. Finnegan's current book project explores how Americans imagined photography's inventional possibilities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finnegan was a recipient of the Campus Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2005-06.

:: Research Interests
Contemporary rhetorical theory; rhetorical criticism; visual culture; photography; American public address (1890-1945); public sphere theory.

:: Representative Recent Publications
Finnegan, Cara A., "Forum: What is This a Picture Of? Some Thoughts on Images and Archives." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9 (Spring 2006): 116-123.

Finnegan, Cara A., "Recognizing Lincoln: Image Vernaculars in Nineteenth Century Visual Culture." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8 (Spring 2005): 31-58.

Finnegan, Cara A. and Jiyeon Kang. "'Sighting' the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory." Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (November 2004): 377-402.

Finnegan, Cara A. "Review Essay: Visual Studies and Visual Rhetoric." Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (May 2004): 234-247.

Finnegan, Cara A. Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003).

:: Website
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/caraf/www