Professor Kaufmann teaches and publishes on European art and architecture 1500–1800 in its global context; the theory and practice of world art history; art, science, and humanism; and the geography and historiography of art. He continues to publish on various aspects of northern and central European art and the history of collections.  Since 2019 his students have completed dissertations on Henri IV of France and the arts; art and confessionalism in northwestern Germany; painting, drawing, and art theory in 17th-century Sweden; imperial and archducal palaces of the 18^th century in Prague, Brussels and Florence; Eastern European hygienic theories and practice c. 1680-1830; luxury scissors and their ornamentation in Early Modern Europe; and the art world of the Hanse 1517-1648.  Current doctoral candidates are working on clock-making and European Chinoiserie in Qing China; late 18th-Century Jesuit studies of China; and animal horns as art in Early Modern Kunstkammern.

At Princeton, Kaufmann is a board member of the programs in Latin American Studies and the Committee for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and a faculty associate of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He is a member of many national and international fellowship and advisory committees, organizations, and associations, a regular participant in museum exhibitions, and has lectured at conferences, universities and museums on five continents. He is formerly vice president of the National Committee of the History of Art, and editor-in-chief of the Oxford Bibliography of the History of Art.

Professor Kaufmann has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy in Berlin, and is a member of the Royal Flemish, Latvian, Swedish and (both) Polish Academies of Science. The Czech Academy of Sciences awarded him the Palacký Medal. Among his many other honors and fellowships, he has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees by the Technical University, Dresden and the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.