Miranda Kaufmann was born in 1982 to a Jewish family in London, a background she credits with instilling an international outlook and a deep curiosity about other cultures. Growing up in a city where walking down a street often felt like a history lesson, she benefited from the museums, galleries, and theatres that surrounded her. This intellectually stimulating environment shaped her early years, but it was during her final undergraduate year at Christ Church, Oxford, that her focus shifted dramatically. She began to investigate Black history as a research topic, a decision that would eventually lead her to uncover a hidden chapter of English history. Her doctoral thesis, completed in 2011, was titled Africans in Britain, 1500, 1640, and it laid the groundwork for her groundbreaking work on the presence of Black people in Tudor England.
Unearthing Silence
The prevailing narrative for centuries held that slavery was the beginning of Africans' presence in England, and that exploitation and discrimination were their only experiences. Kaufmann's research dismantled this assumption, revealing that Black individuals were present in Britain long before the transatlantic slave trade began. Her work highlighted figures like John Blanke, the Black trumpeter to the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII, whose image and story had been largely overlooked. This discovery was not merely academic; it was a call to action. Kaufmann, along with Stephen B. Whatley, inspired the John Blanke Project, an art and archive initiative founded and directed by Michael Ohajuru. The project celebrates and is linked to images of John Blanke, bringing his story to the forefront of public consciousness and challenging the historical silence surrounding Black Tudors.A New Narrative
In 2017, Kaufmann published Black Tudors: The Untold Story, a book that would become a cornerstone of modern Black British history. The book was shortlisted for the 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the Wolfson History Prize, and was nominated as Book of the Year by both the Evening Standard and The Observer. Bidisha, writing in The Guardian, noted that the book debunked the idea that slavery was the beginning of Africans' presence in England. Kaufmann's work, alongside that of historians like David Olusoga, Paul Gilroy, and Sunny Singh, brought England to a necessary reckoning with its true history. Her research was not just about the past; it was about reshaping the present understanding of British identity and heritage. The book's success was a testament to the power of uncovering hidden histories and the need to tell them.Voices in the Archive