Etienne S. Benson’s research focuses on the history of ecology, environmentalism, and human-animal relations since the nineteenth century. In the book Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), he used the history of wildlife radio-tracking to explore the impact that pervasive electronic surveillance has had on the way Americans relate to wildlife and wilderness. He has also published on the ethics of research on endangered species, the history of the term "wildlife," the role of the concepts of biological territoriality in conservation, the significance of ethologists' use of personal names for the animals they study, and the implicit ontologies of digital simulations of animal behavior. Most recently, he has been studying the history of human-animal relationships in human-dominated spaces, which has resulted in articles on the introduction of squirrels to urban centers in the late nineteenth century and the history of conflicts between electric power transmission and birds.

Benson's work in the digital humanities includes an experiment with the meaning of "public" via the visualization of regulatory records concerning endangered species (e.g., records of American big-game hunters who received permits to import polar bear trophies from Canada between 1997 and 2008) as well as an interactive re-creation of one of the earliest digital simulations of animal behavior. He is also using techniques for the analysis of large textual corpora as part of a project on changing understandings of the environment over the past two centuries, and he teaches an advanced undergraduate seminar on Cyberculture that combines the critical study of computing and digital media with hands-on programming exercises.