Cara Caddoo (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)
Project Title
Early Native American Filmgoing and Exhibition
Founders’ Fellowship, 2025–26
Associate Professor of History; Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Indiana University Bloomington
Email
Cara Caddoo is associate professor of history and of cinema and media studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history, with a particular emphasis on the intersections of culture and politics. Her recent work focuses on the experiences of Native Americans and African Americans, examining how film and other emerging media served as tools of cultural expression, resilience, and economic self-determination. Her first book, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Harvard University Press), was a Huffington Post “Best Film Book” selection, a Slate “Great Books You Should’ve Heard About” choice, a recipient of the 2015 biennial Vincent P. De Santis Prize for the best book on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and a finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Prize. She is currently completing a book that explores the formative role of modern cinema in Native American life during the Allotment era.
Selected Publications
- Caddoo, Cara. “Captive and Captivated Audiences: Early Native American Filmgoing.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 64, no. 2 (2025): 10–33.
- Caddoo, Cara. “Rethinking Uplift and Class in Early Black American Cinema.” In Oxford Handbook of American Film History edited by Jon Lewis, 140–62. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.
- Caddoo, Cara. “Spectatorship and The Black Press.” In Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971, edited by Doris Berger, Rhea L. Combs. New York and Los Angeles: Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and DelMonico Book DAP, 2022.
- Caddoo, Cara. “Put Together to Please a Colored Audience: Black Churches, Motion Pictures, and Migration at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Journal of American History 101, no. 3 (2014): 778–803. Reprinted in Early Race Filmmaking, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack. New York: Routledge, 2016.
- Caddoo, Cara. Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.