Kira Thurman is an assistant professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. A classically-trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, she earned her PhD in history from the University of Rochester in 2013 with a minor field in musicology through the Eastman School of Music.

Her research, which has appeared in German Studies Review, the Journal of World History, Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), and Opera Quarterly, focuses on two separate topics that occasionally converge: the relationship between music and national identity in European history, and Europe's historical and contemporary relationship with the Black diaspora.

Her article, "Black Venus, White Bayreuth: Race, Sexuality, and the De-Politicization of Wagner in Postwar West Germany" won the German Studies Association's prize for best paper by a graduate student in 2011 and the DAAD prize for best article on German history in 2014. She is currently writing her first book, which is called Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

She teaches courses on a wide variety of topics, including Music and National Identity; Germany and the Black Diaspora; Global Cultural Encounters; Global Migration; and Performing Race, Gender, Nation (grad seminar).

A newcomer to the digital humanities, she has become interested in applying geo-spatial technologies and data visualization tools to history and musicology, and has taken on two different digital history projects as a result: the first visualizes black biographies in European spaces, and the second maps the German musical diaspora around the world.