Mark Nesbitt

Dr. Mark Nesbitt is a Curator of the Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and holds academic appointments as Visiting Professor in Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, Honorary Senior Lecturer at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent’s Department of Anthropology. His work focuses on the intersection of useful plants, cultural heritage, and historical botany, with particular expertise in economic botany collections, archaeobotanical analysis, and indigenous knowledge systems.

• BSc Agricultural Botany (University of Reading, 1983)
• MSc Bioarchaeology (University of London, 1984)
• PhD (University College London, 1997)

His research explores plant fibers (including barkcloth and textiles), medicinal plants, and the history of botanical institutions over the past 200 years. Notable projects include the Mobile Museum: economic botany in circulation and Digital Amazon, which digitize and contextualize Richard Spruce’s ethnobotanical collections. Nesbitt collaborates extensively with universities such as the University of Glasgow and Royal Holloway on AHRC- and Newton-funded initiatives.

His publications emphasize the role of biocultural collections in preserving material evidence of human-plant relationships, with recent work addressing historical changes in Chinese medicinal materials and the archaeobotanical analysis of Anatolian sites.

• Scientific Awards: Fellow of the Linnean Society
• Editorial Roles: Pharmaceutical Historian, Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine