Etienne Benson

Etienne Benson is Director of Department Knowledge Systems and Collective Life. His research focuses on the history of science, politics, and the environment in the United States and Europe from the eighteenth century to the present.

He is the author of two books, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms (University of Chicago Press, 2020), as well as articles on human-animal relations, conservation and environmentalism, and the Earth and environmental sciences. His current work focuses on the political and scientific implications of the development of a quantitative science of landscapes in the mid-twentieth century.

Etienne Benson studied cognitive neuroscience at Harvard (BA 1999) and psychology at Stanford (MA 2001) before earning a doctorate in the interdisciplinary field of History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT in 2008. He was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). From 2013 to 2022, he was assistant professor and then tenured associate professor at the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he continues to be affiliated as an adjunct professor. He was appointed as a scientific member of the Max Planck Society and director at the MPIWG in 2022. Since 2026, he has held an honorary professorship at the Technische Universität Berlin.

Office hours: Tuesday, 13:00–14:00, in person (room 209)