Janet Stiles Tyson is an independent researcher, writer and lecturer in histories of visual and material culture. A native of the U.S. state of Michigan, she holds Masters degrees in Art History and Studio Art and entered the MPhil program at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2017. She lives in England for much of the year now, and and focuses her research on an eighteenth-century botanical text called 'A Curious Herbal'.