Graduate Profile: Emma Kaufman

When small-town Pennsylvanian Emma Kaufman came to Columbia, she expected to meet brilliant professors, study with motivated peers, and take great courses. She didn’t expect to end up in jail.

But Kaufman, one of two Columbia College seniors to garner the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, hasn’t done anything criminal.

Instead, she spent the last year working for an organization that monitors prisons and advocates for reforms in those that it finds unproductive and inhumane. While studying at the University of Oxford on her scholarship during the next two years, Kaufman hopes to channel her background in philosophy and women’s and gender studies into an M.Phil. in criminology.

The Marshall Scholarship is a program in which the British government provides education, travel, and living expenses at a United Kingdom university for selected United States citizens who will earn or have recently earned bachelors degrees. At least 40 students are awarded scholarships each year.

While she always expressed an interest in the law, Kaufman did not know upon her arrival at Columbia that such an interest could crystallize in the form of theoretical projects. After completing philosophy professor Christia Mercer’s course, Philosophy and Feminism, Kaufman realized that a double major would enable her to use philosophy and women’s studies as lenses for deepening her knowledge in both fields.

“It’s canon and critique running into each other,” she said with excitement in her voice, explaining that in her studies she has applied avant-garde queer theory to discuss the beliefs of “dead white men.”

Internships at Planned Parenthood, the domestic-violence division of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, and the Sexuality Information and Educational Council of the United States introduced her to the practical applications of her work, leading her to a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship for amending criminal justice.

Now working at the Correctional Association of New York, a body with legislative authority to report on the conditions inside prisons, Kaufman communicates with thousands of inmates and writes letters about the details of their crimes.

“The most difficult thing inside the prisons is mistreatment and ... the bureaucratic mess that affects individuals,” Kaufman said. She cited an example in which a less advanced computer system left released prisoners waiting long periods for their Medicaid with fatal consequences.

After studying at Oxford, Kaufman plans to either attend law school or pursue a Ph.D., and eventually litigate the kinds of cases that she investigates today.

Kaufman has immersed herself in the professional opportunities of New York City, but for her, prison reform is part of the Columbia learning experience. “What I really learned is that there is a certain degree to which you can actually understand someone else’s experience. You need to cultivate attitude toward going toward other people.”