Scott Eric Kaufman is in his 4th year in the Ph.D. program in English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. His area of academic specialization is American Modernism, but he is as interested in the noncanonical writers of the period as Eliot, Pound, Faulkner and their ilk. He finds the writers of the Old Left and the CPUSA particularly compelling, and is currently mulling over papers on Sinclair Lewis and Kenneth Fearing. The reason Scott decided on graduate school, a Mr. James Joyce, remains the one of the most significant reasons he remains in graduate school.

Academic interests that have fallen by the wayside include 1) Kafka and his critique of bureaucratic society, 2) cyberpunk and the embodiment of knowledge, 3) Pynchon and the normalization of paranoia, and 4) the effect of commercial media empires on democratic societies.

He is scheduled to take his comprehensives in Winter 2003.