Professor McCauley’s interests range widely across 19th- and early-20th-century visual culture, with a particular focus on the history of photography. Her early work dealt with the institutional formation of commercial photography (which was, in fact, most of photography) during the first generation of negative-positive prints in the 1850s–60s, and she remains concerned with the ways that economic and political forces shape the social status and ideological messages of the photographic. While advocating close looking at original prints and a fundamental understanding of the limits placed on imagery by the techniques used (she has sponsored workshops on Talbot’s calotype process and collodion-on-glass positives for various seminars), she also probes the societal conditions that make possible the shooting, publishing, and dissemination of photographs. She welcomes students working outside the Western canon of art photographs, as well as those who want to reconsider major figures who have not received critical treatment. Other areas in which McCauley has published include the history of caricature, American and European modernist collectors, the historiography of photography, the nude, early anthropological photography, Realism in art and photography, concepts of copyright and originality, Victorian feminism and amateur photography in the 19th century, and the impact of photography on art history as a discipline. Her most recent work has been involved with critical reappraisals of early-20th-century American photography. In The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz, coauthored with Jason Francisco (2012), she considered Stieglitz’s role as a writer in constructing the myth of The Steerage as a modernist icon. She has also uncovered the connections between spiritualism (and theosophy) and abstraction, as seen in the careers of Francis Bruguière and Alvin Langdon Coburn.