Etienne Benson

Research Scholar

Ph.D.

Residence: September 1, 2010 - August 31, 2013

Profile

My research focuses on the intersection of science and politics in the practice of conservation. In my first book, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), I used the figure of the wildlife radio-collar to examine the tension between two late-twentieth-century American obsessions: technology and wildness. My current project concerns the politicized discourses of regulatory burden and scientific freedom in field biology in the United States since the 1960s. 

Before coming to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for the Environment and Department of the History of Science. I received a PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008.