Ben graduated from Virginia Tech with Bachelor’s degrees in History and Industrial and Systems Engineering. While there, he produced works covering the history of the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin and the Austrian balloon-bombings of Venice in 1849. In one internship, he served as an industrial draftsman focusing on railway components. During another, he delved into the archives of the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, identifying and cataloging examples of art by soldiers in the American Civil War for an exhibit titled, The Soldier’s Gaze: Picturing the Civil War. At Virginia Tech, he served as an officer for the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA).
His primary research interest, airships, combines history and engineering. He intends to focus specifically on rigid airships of the interwar period. Alongside this topic, he looks forward to exploring areas such as industrial history, empires of the late 19th century, and the Great War, which all feed into the history of lighter-than-air technology. In his free time, he paints both historical and fantastical wargaming figures.
