Etienne Benson is a historian of the environmental sciences, environmentalism, and human-animal relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries. He studied at Harvard and Stanford, earned a PhD at MIT and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. In his last position, he was Associate Professor at the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Since July 1, 2022, Etienne Benson has been a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.