Benjamin Benus
Associate Professor of Design History
Education
Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park
M.S., Pratt Institute
B.F.A., Pratt Institute.
Departments
- College of Music and Media
- Design
Bio
Benjamin Benus specializes in the history of modern art, with a focus on twentieth-century graphic design in Europe and the United States. His scholarship, which examines historical connections between modernist design and data visualization, has been supported with research fellowships from the Vienna Circle Institute at the University of Vienna; the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami; and the Newberry Library in Chicago.
He is the author of Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury (RIT Press) and co-curator of the related exhibition, “Concept of a Visualist: Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas,” at the Aspen Institute’s Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies in Aspen, Colorado.
Publications
Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury. Rochester, NY: RIT Press, 2023.
“Modernist Graphics, New Typography, and the Design of Identity in the First Czechoslovak Republic.” In Design and Heritage: The Construction of Identity and Belonging, edited by Rebecca Houze and Grace Lees-Maffei, 229–241. New York: Routledge, 2021.
“Otto Neurath’s Social History of Art.” In Creative Collaboration in Art, Practice, Research and Pedagogy, edited by M. Kathryn Shields and Sunny Spillane, 137–164. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018.
“The Vienna Method in Amsterdam: Peter Alma’s Office for Pictorial Statistics” (coauthored with Wim Jansen). Design Issues 32, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 19–36.
“Figurative Constructivism and Sociological Graphics.” In Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971, edited by Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, 216–248. London: Hyphen Press, 2013.