Cara Caddoo

Biography

Cara Caddoo is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and The Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research, teaching, and creative work focus on nineteenth and twentiethcentury American history, with particular emphasis on the intersections of culture and politics. She is especially interested in film and emerging media, infrastructures, and popular culture as they figured into the experiences of Native Americans and African Americans. In 2022, Caddoo identified a fragment of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company’s The Trooper of Troop K (1915), which has been verified by the Library of Congress as the earliest surviving footage produced by a Black film company.

Her forthcoming book, Native American Theaters and Moviegoing in the Silent Era (University of California Press), examines the formative role of modern cinema in Native American life during the Allotment era, when the U.S. government divided tribal lands and violently pursued a policy of cultural assimilation. During this period, missionaries and government officials associated cinema with Euro-American modernity. Viewing filmgoing as an acculturating alternative to Indigenous cultural practices such as potlatch and dance, they compelled Native people to attend film exhibitions on reservations and at church- and government-sponsored boarding schools. By the 1920s, most boarding schools in the United States and many in Canada had incorporated moving pictures into their pedagogical practices. Yet many Native Nations also forged their own—often very different–cinema cultures. By operating and attending their own theaters, they expressed their respective investments in economic sovereignty, community bonds, and the survival of valued cultural practices.

Caddoo’s first book, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Harvard University Press), uncovers the history of Black cinema that developed across the pathways of turn-of-the-century migration. These developments informed the first mass Black protest movement of the twentieth century, which politicized the demand for visual self-representation and articulated the belief that mischaracterizations in film constituted “civil death” and a violation of “natural rights.” The book is currently being translated into French.

Caddoo’s articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including the Journal of American History, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the Journal of African American History, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. She has also directed and co-directed several video and digital media projects, including New Visions of Black Cinema and the Aesthetics of Black Modernity and Ghosted: Black Indianapolis Film History. She is currently completing an AVAnnotate exhibit of By Right of Birth and The Flying Ace with doctoral student Kristin Wells.

Caddoo has recently held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and the National Humanities Center in Durham, NC. Her research has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and the American Philosophical Society. She has held residencies at the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, Alaska, and at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, through the Organization of American Historians (OAH)- Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS) Japan Residencies Program.

Her recent graduate courses include Visual Culture and Infrastructures in American History. Her undergraduate courses include Advertising, PR, Propaganda in American History; Modern America; Cinema History I: 1895–1945; and Screening Race and Ethnicity.

Selected Awards

• 2026 Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Member, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, New Jersey
• 2025 Founders’ Fellow, National Humanities Center, Durham, North Carolina
• 2024 Visiting Scholar, Sealaska Heritage Institute, Juneau, Alaska
• 2017 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Fellowship, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars [formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation]
• “Best Film Books of 2015,” Huffington Post, 2015
• Winner, Vincent P. DeSantis Best First Book Prize, Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2015
• Finalist, Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Prize, 2015
• “27 Great Books You Should’ve Heard About” Annual List, Slate, 2015

Publication Highlights

• Native American Theaters and Moviegoing, 1903-1930 (Forthcoming, University of California Press)
• Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
  http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368057