James C. Kaufman

James C. Kaufman (1974-) is an associate professor at the California State University, San Bernardino, where he is the director of the Learning Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in Cognitive Psychology, where he worked with Robert J. Sternberg. Born in Great Neck, New York, he attended the University of Southern California as an undergraduate.

With Sternberg and Jean Pretz, he developed the propulsion model of creative contributions, outlined in The Creativity Conundrum (Psychology Press, 2002).

He coined “the Sylvia Plath Effect,” after finding that female poets were more likely to be mentally ill than other writers, in a paper in Journal of Creative Behavior, and his work on poets dying young has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, BBC, CNN, and newspapers and magazines across the world.

Other books include Applied Intelligence (with Sternberg and Elena Grigorenko; Cambridge, in press). Essentials of Creativity Assessment (with Jonathan Plucker and John Baer; Wiley, in press) and serving as the co-editor of The Evolution of Intelligence (with Sternberg; Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), Creativity Across Domains: Faces of the Muse (with Baer, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), Gender Differences in Mathematics (with Ann Gallagher; Cambridge, 2004), The International Handbook of Creativity (with Sternberg; Cambridge, 2006), Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development (with Baer; Cambridge, 2006), and The Psychology of Creative Writing (with Scott Kaufman, Cambridge, in press). He is the Series Editor of the new Psych 101 series from Springer, and is writing Creativity 101 for the series.

He is a co-editor on the new journal of the American Psychological Association's Division 10, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, which begins publication in 2006. He is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Creative Behavior; has served as the Associate Editor of Research in the Schools; is recently was a guest editor (with Baer) of a special issue of Creativity Research Journal devoted to Ellis Paul Torrance. He has published over 85 papers in numerous books and journals, including American Psychologist, Annual Review of Psychology, Intelligence, Review of General Psychology, Leadership Quarterly, and Psychological Assessment. He received the 2003 Daniel E. Berlyne Award from Division 10 of the American Psychological Association for outstanding research by a junior scholar.

His parents are psychologists Alan S. Kaufman and Nadeen L. Kaufman.