Miranda Kaufmann

• 1. Introduction

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  Miranda Kaufmann grew up in London. The city, she later said, is one where "just walking down a London street is often a history lesson in itself." The history she devoted her career to, though, had been missing from that lesson for a long time. Her work as a historian, journalist, and educator has centred on one uncomfortable question. If Africans were present in England during the Tudor period, before the transatlantic slave trade, why does the national story begin with slavery? That question led her into the archives. What she found there changed the conversation about who belongs in England's past.

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• 2. An International Outlook

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  Kaufmann was born in 1982 to a Jewish family in London. She later credited that upbringing with giving her "an international outlook and curiosity about other people and cultures." She has described London as "a hugely intellectually stimulating place to grow up." Its museums, galleries, and theatres were resources she drew on directly. She read history at Christ Church, Oxford. It was in her final undergraduate year that Black history first became a serious research focus. The doctoral thesis she completed in 2011 bore the title "Africans in Britain, 1500-1640." Six years after completing that thesis, she published Black Tudors: The Untold Story through Oneworld Publications.

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• 3. The Untold Story

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  Writing in The Guardian, Bidisha described Black Tudors as a book that "debunks the idea that slavery was the beginning of Africans' presence in England." Kaufmann had recovered evidence of a different reality: Africans who lived and worked in England before bondage defined their relationship with the country.

  Black Tudors was shortlisted for both the 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Wolfson History Prize. The Evening Standard and The Observer each nominated it as Book of the Year. In the same review, Bidisha placed Kaufmann among a generation of historians she said were bringing England "to a necessary reckoning with its true history." She named David Olusoga, Paul Gilroy, and Sunny Singh among them. Bidisha also pointed to the University of York's project on medieval multiculturalism as evidence of the same shift. Kaufmann had already advised on the Tudor episode of Olusoga's 2016 BBC Television series Black and British: A Forgotten History.

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• 4. History in Collaboration

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  Since 2014, Kaufmann has co-convened the workshop series "What's Happening in Black British History?" at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. Her co-convenor is art and cultural historian Michael Ohajuru. The Institute is part of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, where Kaufmann holds a senior research fellowship.

  Kaufmann, alongside Stephen B. Whatley, also inspired the John Blanke Project, an art and archive initiative. Ohajuru serves as its founder and director. At the project's centre is John Blanke, the Black trumpeter who served the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. The initiative is built around surviving images of Blanke himself.

  Kaufmann has written for the Times Literary Supplement, The Times, The Guardian, and BBC History magazine. She has contributed to features on Black British history across radio, television, and video, and appeared on Sky News, Al Jazeera, and BBC Television. She has also spoken at educational institutions, conferences, festivals, and seminars internationally.

  Kaufmann is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts. In 2025, Oneworld Publications published her second book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery.

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