She is currently Emeritus Professor of Heritage Anthropology at University College London.
[1] Bender studied for a PhD on the Neolithic of Northern France at the Institute of Archaeology, London.
[3] Her first monograph Farming in Prehistory, published in 1975, was described as a 'painstaking compilation' of archaeological evidence on the development of agriculture.
[5] Bender's later work utilised a phenomenological approach to landscape, collaborating with Sue Hamilton and Christopher Tilley.
In the late 1990s, Bender, Hamilton and Tilley developed a landscape research project, with the support of UCL students, that focused on the Bronze Age settlement and stone circle at Leskernick on Bodmin Moor.