Lorraine Daston

Lorraine Daston (born June 9, 1951) is an American historian of science. Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, she is an authority on Early Modern European scientific and intellectual history. In 1993, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

Education

 * Study of history and science at Harvard University (BA 1973 summa cum laude)
 * diploma in history and philosophy of science Univ. of Cambridge (1974)
 * PhD in the history of science Harvard Univ. (1979), supervised by I. Bernard Cohen

Scholarly activities
Daston divides her year between a nine-month period in Berlin, and a three-month period in Chicago, where she usually teaches a seminar and assists doctoral students.

Daston was appointed the inaugural Humanitas Professor in the History of Ideas at University of Oxford for 2013. She has also held Oxford's Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professorship in Intellectual History. In 2002, she delivered two Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, in which she traced theoretical conceptions of nature in several literary and philosophical works. In 2006, she gave the British Academy's Master-Mind Lecture.

She is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.

Daston was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010. In 2013, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Princeton University. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017. In 2018, she received the Dan David Prize. She is married to the German psychologist and social scientist Gerd Gigerenzer.

Monographs

 * Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate, Columbia Global Reports 2023, ISBN 979-8987053560.
 * Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, Princeton University Press 2022, ISBN 978-0691254081.
 * Against Nature, MIT Press 2019, ISBN 978-0262537339.
 * with Peter Galison: Objectivity, Zone Books 2007, ISBN 978-1890951795.
 * Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen: zur Geschichte der Rationalität, Fischer Verlag 2001, ISBN 978-3596147632.
 * Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit, Siemens-Stiftung 2001.
 * with Katharine Park: Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750, Zone Books 1998, ISBN 978-0942299915.
 * Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, Princeton University Press 1988, ISBN 978-0691084978.

As editor

 * with Elizabeth Lunbeck: Histories of scientific observation, University of Chicago Press 2011, ISBN 978-0226136776.
 * with Michael Stolleis: Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe, Ashgate 2008, ISBN 978-0754657613
 * with Fernando Vidal: The Moral Authority of Nature, University of Chicago Press 2003, ISBN 978-0226136813.
 * Biographies of Scientific Objects, University of Chicago Press 2000, ISBN 978-0226136721.

Articles (selection)

 * with Moritz Stefaner & Jen Christiansen: "The language of science". 175 Years of Discovery. Scientific American. 323 (3): 2020, 24–31.
 * "Before the Two Cultures: Big Science and Big Humanities in the Nineteenth Century". Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. IX (1): 2015. brief description, Bookstore, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
 * "The Disciplines of Attention," in David E. Wellbery, ed., A New History of German Literature, Harvard University Press Reference Library, 2005.
 * "The Morality of Natural Orders: The Power of Medea" and "Nature's Customs versus Nature's Laws". Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, 2002.
 * "The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment". Science in Context. 4 (2): 1991, pp. 367-386.