Janet O’Brien completed her PhD in 2022 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She was awarded three partial scholarships from 2017 to 2020 for her thesis Nādir Shāh: The Emergence of Royal Portraiture and a New Body Politic in Eighteenth-Century Iran. While preparing her PhD, O’Biren was Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington DC, from June 2020 to May 2022.