Miranda Kaufmann

Last updated

Miranda Kaufmann
Miranda Kaufmann.jpg
Born
Miranda Clare Kaufmann

1982 (age 40–41)
London, England
Alma mater Christ Church, Oxford
Occupation(s)Historian, journalist and educator
Notable workBlack Tudors: The Untold Story (2017)
Website www.mirandakaufmann.com

Miranda Clare Kaufmann (born 1982) is a British historian, journalist and educator, whose work has focused on Black British history. She is the author of the 2017 book Black Tudors: The Untold Story, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize and the Wolfson History Prize. She is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (part of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London), where since 2014 she has co-convened the workshop series "What's Happening in Black British History?" with Michael Ohajuru. [1]

Contents

Biography

Miranda Kaufmann was born in 1982 in 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. [2] She read history at Christ Church, Oxford, becoming interested in Black history as a research topic during her final undergraduate year, [2] and going on to complete in 2011 her doctoral thesis entitled "Africans in Britain, 1500–1640". [3] [4]

Since 2014, Kaufmann has been co-convenor, together with art and cultural historian Michael Ohajuru, [5] 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", [6] an art and archive initiative of which Ohajuru is the founder and director; [7] the Project celebrates and is linked to images of John Blanke, the Black trumpeter to the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. [8] [9] [10]

Kaufmann has written articles for a range of publications, including The Times Literary Supplement , The Times , The Guardian , and BBC History magazine, [11] has contributed to features about Black British History on radio, television and video, [12] [13] as well as appearing on Sky News, Al Jazeera and BBC Television. [14] Additionally, Kaufmann has participated in and spoken at many educational institutions, conferences, festivals and seminars internationally. [3] [15] She advised on the Tudor episode of David Olusoga's 2016 BBC Television documentary series Black and British: A Forgotten History . [16]

Her first book, Black Tudors: The Untold Story, was published in 2017 by Oneworld Publications. [17] 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." [18] Black Tudors was shortlisted for the 2018 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding [19] and for the Wolfson History Prize, [20] [21] and was also nominated as "Book of the Year" by the Evening Standard and The Observer . [14]

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]

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neil MacGregor</span> British art historian (born 1946)

Robert Neil MacGregor is a British art historian and former museum director. He was editor of the Burlington Magazine from 1981 to 1987, then Director of the National Gallery, London, from 1987 to 2002, Director of the British Museum from 2003 to 2009, and founding director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin until 2018.

Hazel Vivian Carby is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and of American Studies. She served as Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diarmaid MacCulloch</span> English academic, professor, and historian of Christianity (born 1951)

Diarmaid Ninian John MacCulloch is an English academic and historian, specialising in ecclesiastical history and the history of Christianity. Since 1995, he has been a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford; he was formerly the senior tutor. Since 1997, he has been Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">West Africa Squadron</span> Military unit

The West Africa Squadron, also known as the Preventative Squadron, was a squadron of the British Royal Navy whose goal was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa. Formed in 1808 after the British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1807 and based out of Portsmouth, England, it remained an independent command until 1856 and then again from 1866 to 1867.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black British people</span> British people of African descent

Black British people are a multi-ethnic group of British citizens of either African or Afro-Caribbean people descent. The term Black British developed in the 1950s, referring to the Black British West Indian people from the former Caribbean British colonies in the West Indies now referred to as the Windrush Generation and people from Africa, who are residents of the United Kingdom and are British citizens.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hallie Rubenhold</span> British historian and author

Hallie Rubenhold is an American-born British historian and author. Her work specializes in 18th and 19th century social history and women's history. Her 2019 book The Five, about the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper, was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction. Rubenhold's focus on the victims of murder, rather than on the identity or the acts of the perpetrator, has been credited with changing attitudes to the proper commemoration of such crimes and to the appeal and function of the true crime genre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hakim Adi</span> British historian and scholar

Hakim Adi is a British historian and scholar who specializes in African affairs. He is the first African-British historian to become a professor of history in the UK. He has written widely on Pan-Africanism and the modern political history of Africa and the African diaspora, including the 2018 book Pan-Africanism: A History. Currently a professor at the University of Chichester, Adi is an advocate of the education curriculum including the history of Africa and its diaspora.

Carole Hillenbrand,, is a British Islamic scholar who is Emerita Professor in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh and Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. She is the Vice-President of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and a Member of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.

Oneworld Publications is a British independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey originally to publish accessible non-fiction by experts and academics for the general market. Based in London, it later added a literary fiction list and both a children's list and an upmarket crime list, and now publishes across a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, current affairs, popular science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, as well as literary fiction, crime fiction and suspense, and children's titles.

Bidisha Mamata is a British broadcaster and presenter specialising in international affairs and human rights, political analysis, the arts and culture. She is also a multimedia artist making films and stills.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Blanke</span> English trumpeter, fl. 1501–1511

John Blanke was a musician of African descent in London from the early Tudor period, who probably came to England as one of the African attendants of Catherine of Aragon in 1501. He is one of the earliest recorded black people in what is now the United Kingdom after the Roman period. His name may refer to his skin colour, derived either from the word "black" or possibly from the French word "blanc", meaning white.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Olusoga</span> British historian and television presenter (born 1970)

David Adetayo Olusoga is a British historian, writer, broadcaster, presenter and filmmaker. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. He has presented historical documentaries on the BBC and contributed to The One Show and The Guardian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1511 Westminster Tournament Roll</span>

The 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll is a painted roll of 36 vellum membranes sewn together. It is almost 60 feet long and 143⁄4 inches wide. The Roll depicts the joust called by Henry VIII in February 1511 to celebrate the birth of his son, Henry, Duke of Cornwall, to Catherine of Aragon, on New Year's Day of that year.

Toby Green is a British historian who is a Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King's College London. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in African studies at the University of Birmingham. He is Chair of the Fontes Historiae Africanae Committee of the British Academy, and has written extensively about African early modern history and colonial African slavery, mainly focussed on slavery in the Portuguese colonies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Olivette Otele</span>

Olivette Otele FLSW is a historian and distinguished research professor at SOAS University of London. She was previously Professor of the History of Slavery at Bristol University. She was Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society, and Chair of Bristol's Race Equality Commission. She is an expert on the links between history, memory, and geopolitics in relation to French and British colonial pasts. She is the first Black woman to be appointed to a professorial chair in History in the United Kingdom.

Reasonable Blackman was a silk weaver resident in Southwark, London, in the late sixteenth century. He was among the earliest people of American heritage to be living and working as an independent business owner in London in that era. He may have come to London via the Netherlands, which had a relatively significant African population at the time and also a significant trade in silk, although his original provenance is unknown.

White Cross Manor was the manor house in Lydney, Gloucestershire, England, of the Wynter family. It was burnt to the ground in April 1645 on the orders of Sir John Wynter to avoid it being taken over by the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Jetto</span> 17th-century black Worcestershire yeoman.

Henry or Henrie Anthonie Jetto was a black English yeoman, the earliest-known black person with an extant will in England and the earliest to have resided in Worcestershire.

Black and British: A Forgotten History is a four-part BBC Television documentary series, written and presented by David Olusoga and first broadcast in November 2016, and a book of the same title written by Olusoga to accompany the series.

The British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding is a prize granted by the British Academy for "outstanding scholarly contributions to global cultural understanding". The prize is £25,000.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Dr Miranda Clare Kaufmann". Directory of Research and Expertise. University of London. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  2. 1 2 Pells, Rachael (13 December 2018). "Interview with Miranda Kaufmann". Times Higher Education . Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  3. 1 2 "Bio | Miranda Kaufmann" . Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  4. ↑ Kaufmann, Miranda (2011). Africans in Britain, 1500–1640. Oxford University Research Archive (Thesis). University of Oxford.
  5. ↑ Moffat, Chris (16 April 2015). "Michael Ohajuru". Black British History. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  6. ↑ Ohajuru, Michael (21 December 2021). "About The John Blanke Project". John Blanke.com. Retrieved 10 July 2023.
  7. ↑ "Michael I. Ohajuru". British Art Network. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  8. ↑ Lohmann, Silke (18 October 2021). "The John Blanke Project". London Art Week . Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  9. ↑ "The John Blanke Project: Imagine the Black Tudor Trumpeter | National Portrait Gallery, London (June 2023, permanent collection)". The John Blanke Project. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  10. ↑ "The John Blanke Project In National Portrait Gallery Permanent Collection". The John Blanke Project. 21 June 2023. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  11. ↑ Ndiaye, Noémie (2018). "Black Tudors: The Untold Story by Miranda Kaufmann (review)". Shakespeare Quarterly. 69 (4): 263–266. Project MUSE   723775.
  12. ↑ "Black British History". Free Thinking. BBC Radio 3. 9 November 2016. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  13. ↑ "Africans and their lives in Tudor England". BBC Bitesize . BBC. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  14. 1 2 "Black Tudors". Black History Magazine. 14 February 2008. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  15. ↑ "Dr Miranda Kaufmann". Gresham College . Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  16. ↑ Page, Benedicte (21 July 2017). "Miranda Kaufmann | 'I hope my book isn't the last word on this'". The Bookseller . Retrieved 16 November 2023.
  17. ↑ "Black Tudors". Oneworld.
  18. ↑ Bidisha (29 October 2017). "Tudor, English and black – and not a slave in sight". The Guardian.
  19. ↑ "'Black Tudors' by Miranda Kaufmann". The British Academy. 1 October 2018. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  20. ↑ "2018 Shortlist | 'Black Tudors: The Untold Story'". The Wolfson History Prize. Retrieved 12 July 2023.
  21. ↑ "Awards: SIBA's Southern Book Finalists; Wolfson History Shortlist". Shelf Awareness. 20 April 2018. Retrieved 9 July 2023.
  22. ↑ Cowdrey, Katherine (28 September 2018). "Oneworld acquires new book from 'Black Tudors' author Miranda Kaufmann". The Bookseller. Retrieved 16 November 2023.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.