Etienne Benson is a historian of environmental knowledge, environmental movements, and human-animal relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries. After studying psychology at Harvard (BA 1999) and Stanford (MA 2001), he earned 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. In 2022, he became the director of the Department “Knowledge Systems and Collective Life” at the MPIWG. He holds an honorary professorship at the Technische Universität Berlin.