Miranda Kaufmann was born in 1982 to a Jewish family in
London, 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. She read history at
Christ Church, Oxford, becoming interested in Black history as a research topic during her final undergraduate year, Since 2014, Kaufmann has been co-convenor, together with art and cultural historian Michael Ohajuru, of the workshop series "What's Happening in Black British History?" at the
Institute of Commonwealth Studies. an art and archive initiative of which Ohajuru is the founder and director; the Project celebrates and is linked to images of
John Blanke, the Black trumpeter to the courts of
Henry VII and
Henry VIII. Kaufmann has written articles for a range of publications, including
The Times Literary Supplement,
The Times,
The Guardian, and
BBC History magazine, has contributed to features about Black British History on radio, television and video, as well as appearing on
Sky News,
Al Jazeera and
BBC Television. Additionally, Kaufmann has participated in and spoken at many educational institutions, conferences, festivals and seminars internationally. She advised on the Tudor episode of
David Olusoga's 2016 BBC Television documentary series
Black and British: A Forgotten History. Her first book,
Black Tudors: The Untold Story, was published in 2017 by
Oneworld Publications. 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."
Black Tudors was shortlisted for the 2018
Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and for the
Wolfson History Prize, and was also nominated as "Book of the Year" by the
Evening Standard and
The Observer. Kaufmann is an Honorary Fellow of the
University of Liverpool, a Fellow of the
Royal Historical Society and of the
Royal Society of Arts. == Books ==