James C. Kaufman

Professor

Expertise: Creativity

Educational Psychology

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Academic Degrees:

Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology, Yale, 2001

Biography:

James C. Kaufman is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author/editor of more than 50 books, including Creativity 101 (2^nd Edition, 2016) and the Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (2nd Edition, 2019; with Robert Sternberg). He has published more than 300 papers, including the study that spawned the “Sylvia Plath Effect,” and three well-known theories of creativity, including (with Ron Beghetto) the Four-C Model of Creativity. He is a past president of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association. James has won many awards, including Mensa’s research award, the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and APA’s Berlyne and Farnsworth awards. He co-founded two major journals (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and Psychology of Popular Media Culture). He has tested Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s creativity on CNN, appeared in the hit Australia show Redesign Your Brain, and narrated the comic book documentary Independents. He wrote the book and lyrics to Discovering Magenta, which had its NYC premiere in 2015.

Active Research Areas:

Creativity and Meaning; Creativity Assessment; Creativity and Related Constructs/Individual Differences; Creativity and Social Justice/Equity; other Creativity-related topics.

Selected Recent Publications:

Books:

Kaufman, J. C. (in press). The creativity advantage. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kaufman, J. C., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.) (2019). Cambridge handbook of creativity (2^nd Ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kaufman, A. B., & Kaufman, J. C. (Eds.) (2018). Pseudoscience: The conspiracy against science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sternberg, R. J., & Kaufman, J. C. (Eds.) (2018). Nature of human creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kaufman, J. C., Glăveanu, V., & Baer, J. (Eds.) (2017). Cambridge handbook of creativity across domains. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kaufman, J. C. (2016). Creativity 101 (2^nd Ed). New York: Springer.

Beghetto, R. A., Kaufman, J. C., & Baer, J.  (2014). Teaching for creativity in the common core classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

 

Articles/Chapters

* = coauthor who was a student/former student at time of publication

Kaufman J. C., Arrington, K.*, Barnett, P. J.*, Holinger, M.*, Liu, X.*, & Xie, L.* (in press). Creativity is our gig: Focusing on the positive and practical. Translational Issues in Psychological Science.

Kaufman, J. C., & Glăveanu, V. P. (in press). Making the CASE for shadow creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

Kaufman, J. C., Kapoor, H., Patston, T. J., & Cropley, D. H. (in press). Explaining standardized educational test scores: The role of creativity above and beyond GPA and personality. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

Glăveanu, V. P., & Kaufman, J. C. (2020). The creativity matrix: Spotlights and blind spots in our understanding of the phenomenon. Journal of Creative Behavior, 54, 884-896.

Kapoor, H., & Kaufman, J. C. (2020). Meaning-making through creativity during COVID-19. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 595990.

Connery, C. E.*, Green III, P. C., & Kaufman, J. C. (2019). The underrepresentation of CLD Students in Gifted and Talented Programs: Implications for law and practice. University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender & Class, 19, 81–101.

Kaufman, J. C. (2019). Self assessments of creativity: Not ideal, but better than you think. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13, 187-192.

Kaufman, J. C. (2018). Finding meaning with creativity in the past, present, and future. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13, 734-749.