Peter Benes

Peter Benes (elected October 2006) died March 12, 2021. Benes established the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, an annual series now based at Historic Deerfield. Since the mid-1970s the Dublin Seminar has played a significant role in promoting scholarship on a wide variety of topics, including Benes’s own interest in gravestone sculpture. Benes’s collection of photographic prints of southeastern Massachusetts grave markers, taken for his book The Masks of Orthodoxy (1977), is housed in the special collections department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.