Mark Benz (1993-2020)

Mark Benz, a kind and brilliant young scholar with an original mind, died unexpectedly in his New York City apartment on Friday, February 14^th. He was 26.

At the time of his death, Mark had been an MA/MSc student in International and World History at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, working on a thesis on the American sociologist Talcott Parsons.

Mark's intellectual interests ranged widely. After graduating from Brown University with an AB degree in Philosophy and Mathematics, he began working in a neuroscience laboratory in Portland, Oregon, studying the connection between short-term memory and schizophrenia in mice. At this he was no slouch. A statistician in a lab full of biologists, Mark described himself as being like a “one-eyed king in the land of the blind.” Tasked with increasing the lab's efficiency at inserting tiny cameras into the brains of mice, Mark evidently pioneered a plexiglass contraption that allowed him to do just that.

Upon moving back to Providence, RI in 2019, Mark served as Outreach Coordinator for RICARES, an organization focused on aiding Rhode Islanders impacted by substance use. Mark cared deeply about this work. In many ways it embodied his profound generosity and thoughtfulness more than his prodigious scholarship ever could.

As a teenager, Mark was a nationally ranked climber, participating in bouldering competitions around Colorado. An avid outdoorsman, he was highly regarded by friends and family for his skill as an oarsman and reader of water. Itinerant by nature, Mark was an avid trainhopper who would often ride freight from East Coast to West and back again.

Mark was in some sense defined by his restlessness, both in his physical and intellectual life. His extracurricular activities tended toward the freewheeling and the adventurous. His book collection was famous both for its breadth and for its eclecticism. Mark was known to read long books on dense and difficult subjects in one sitting. Category theory, Marxian economics, cognitive neuroscience—all were subjects that Mark felt he needed to understand as a proviso to more quotidian concerns.

Mark was made angry by economic injustice. For him, the life of the mind did not preclude either loving engagement with his friends and his community or engagement of the natural world. Mark was all-embracing. Imagine Karl Marx's brain in John Muir's body. Mark enjoyed gardening and was particularly enamored of clover. Once when his cooperative was faced with a surplus of several thousand dollars, Mark suggested using it to buy all 50 volumes of the collected works of Marx and Engels.

Mark would sometimes apologize for being an easy laugh. Thankfully his laugh was a hearty one. For all his achievements, for all his genius—and he was a genius—it is likely his laugher that intimates will miss the most. Sure, the matted mullet and distinctive stench. But his laughter and all that it implied about the inherent good of the world—that will be missed the most.