Miranda Kaufmann

Miranda Kaufmann was born in 1982 to a Jewish family in London,^[2] about which she has said: "I think it gave me an international outlook and curiosity about other people and cultures. It was also a hugely intellectually stimulating place to grow up. I benefited from all the museums, galleries and theatres; and just walking down a London street is often a history lesson in itself.^[3] She read history at Christ Church, Oxford, becoming interested in Black history as a research topic during her final undergraduate year,^[3] and going on to complete in 2011 her doctoral thesis entitled "Africans in Britain, 1500–1640".^[4][5]

Since 2014, Kaufmann has been co-convenor, together with art and cultural historian Michael Ohajuru,^[6] of the workshop series "What's Happening in Black British History?" at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.^[1] Kaufmann along with Stephen B. Whatley inspired the "John Blanke Project",^[7] an art and archive initiative of which Ohajuru is the founder and director;^[8] the Project celebrates and is linked to images of John Blanke, the Black trumpeter to the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII.^[9][10][11]

Kaufmann has written articles for a range of publications, including The Times Literary Supplement, The Times, The Guardian, and BBC History magazine,^[12] has contributed to features about Black British History on radio, television and video,^[13][14] as well as appearing on Sky News, Al Jazeera and BBC Television.^[15] Additionally, Kaufmann has participated in and spoken at many educational institutions, conferences, festivals and seminars internationally.^[4][16] She advised on the Tudor episode of David Olusoga's 2016 BBC Television documentary series Black and British: A Forgotten History.^[17]

Her first book, Black Tudors: The Untold Story, was published in 2017 by Oneworld Publications.^[18] As Bidisha observed in The Guardian, the book "debunks the idea that slavery was the beginning of Africans’ presence in England, and exploitation and discrimination their only experience. [...] Along with writers such as David Olusoga, Paul Gilroy and Sunny Singh, and institutions such as the University of York, which has launched a project investigating medieval multiculturalism, historians such as Miranda Kaufmann are bringing England to a necessary reckoning with its true history."^[19] Black Tudors was shortlisted for the 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding^[20] and for the Wolfson History Prize,^[21][22] and was also nominated as "Book of the Year" by the Evening Standard and The Observer.^[15]

Her next book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery, was published in 2025.^[23]

Kaufmann is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Arts.^[1]

• Black Tudors: The Untold Story, Oneworld, 2017, hardback ISBN 9781786071842; paperback ISBN 9781786073969.
• Heiresses: The Caribbean Marriage Trade, Oneworld, 2025, ISBN 9780861548019.^[24]

• Blackamoores