Lorraine Daston
Emeritus Scientific Member (Since 1995)
PhD, Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago/MPIWG Director 1995–2019
Lorraine Daston has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence of the scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. Recent books include Gegen die Natur (2018; English edition Against Nature, 2019) as well as Science in the Archives (2017) and (with Paul Erikson et al.) How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (2014), the latter two both products of MPIWG Working Groups.
Since her retirement from the directorship of Department II in 2019, she has published Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (2022), which has been translated into eleven languages, and Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (2023), about international governance in science. Her current book project is based on her 2024 Terry Lectures at Yale University, Thinking with Natural Disasters.
She is the recipient of the Pfizer Prize and Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the Dan David Prize in the History of Science, the Gerda Henkel Prize in the Humanities, and the Heineken Prize in History of the Royal Netherlands Academy, and the Balzan Prize, and holds honorary degrees from Princeton University, the Hebrew University, and the Ecole Fédérale de Lausanne. She is a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and a regular visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Current Projects
Completed Projects
Selected Publications
Daston, Lorraine (2023). Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate. New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports.
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Daston, Lorraine (2022). Rules: A Short History of What We Live By. The Lawrence Stone Lectures 23. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691239187.
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Daston, Lorraine (2019). Against Nature. Untimely Meditations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Daston, Lorraine and Peter Harrison (2024). “The Missing Conversation.” Aeon (blog), January 1, 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/science-and-history-cannot-afford-to-be-indifferent-to-each-other.
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Daston, Lorraine (2024). “Perspectives all the Way Down. Review of: Lloyd, Geoffrey and Aparecida Vilaça: Of Jaguars and Butterflies: Metalogues on Issues in Anthropology and Philosophy.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 49 (1): 157–164. https://doi.org/10.1177/03080188241229840.
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Daston, Lorraine (2024). “Unicorn or Narwhal? Review of: Broberg, Gunnar: The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus. Oxford: Princeton University Press 2023.” London Review of Books 46 (4): 31–32. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n04/lorraine-daston/unicorn-or-narwhal.
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Daston, Lorraine (2023). “The Virtue of Discretion.” Aeon (blog), April 21, 2023. https://aeon.co/essays/discretion-is-hard-to-live-with-even-harder-to-live-without.
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Daston, Lorraine (2023). “What Is Scientific Truth — And Why Does It Keep Changing?” Marginalia Review of Books (blog), April 28, 2023. https://www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/what-is-scientific-truth-and-why-does-it-keep-changing.
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Daston, Lorraine (2022). “Das geistige Auge.” In Vollendete Tatsachen: vom endgültig Vorläufigen und vorläufig Endgültigen in der Wissenschaft, ed. C. von Xylander and A. Nordmann, 191–216. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
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Daston, Lorraine (2022). “The Secret History of Science and Modernity: The History of Science and the History of Religion.” Grey Room 88: 14–31. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00347.
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Daston, Lorraine (2020). “The Accidental Trace and the Science of the Future: Tales from the Nineteenth-Century Archives.” In Photo-Objects: On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives in the Humanities and Sciences, ed. J. Bärnighausen, C. Caraffa, S. Klamm, F. Schneider, and P. Wodtke, 83–100. Berlin: Edition Open Access. https://doi.org/10.34663/9783945561409-05.
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Daston, Lorraine (2021). Contra la naturaleza. Barcelona: Herder Editorial.
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Daston, Lorraine (2019). “The coup d’oeil: On a Mode of Understanding.” Critical Inquiry 45 (2): 307–331. https://doi.org/10.1086/700990.
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Daston, Lorraine (2017). “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge.” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 1 (1): 131–154. https://doi.org/10.1086/691678.
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Daston, Lorraine (2016). “History of science without ‘Structure.’” In Kuhn’s “Structure of scientific revolutions” at fifty : reflections on a science classic, ed. R. J. Richards and L. Daston, 115–132. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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Daston, Lorraine (2016). “Cloud physiognomy.” Representations 135 (1): 45–71. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2016.135.1.45.
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Daston, Lorraine (2016). “Authenticity, autopsia, and Theodor Mommsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum.” In For the sake of learning : essays in honor of Anthony Grafton. Vol. 2, ed. A. Blair and A.-S. Goeing, 955–973. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004263314_054.
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Daston, Lorraine (2016). “When science went modern.” The Hedgehog Review 18 (3). https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-cultural-contradictions-of-modern-science/articles/when-science-went-modern.
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Daston, Lorraine (2015). “Epistemic images.” In Vision and its instruments : art, science, and technology in early modern Europe, ed. A. Payne, 13–35. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
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Daston, Lorraine (2014). “The naturalistic fallacy is modern.” Isis 105 (3): 579–587. https://doi.org/10.1086/678173.
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Erickson, Paul, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin (2013). How reason almost lost its mind : the strange career of Cold War rationality. Chicago [u.a.]: The University of Chicago Press.
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Daston, Lorraine (2012). “The sciences of the archive.” Osiris 27 (1): 156–187. https://doi.org/10.1086/667826.
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Daston, Lorraine (2008). “On scientific observation.” Isis 99 (1): 97–110. https://doi.org/10.1086/587535.
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Bookshelf
Feature Story
Media
Presentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities
Conference Undead Texts: Grand Narratives in the History of the Human Sciences at Columbia University and MPIWG
Keynote Lecture, Conference Media of Exactitude in The Humanities, Art, And Sciences at the University of Basel
Lecture at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing
Lecture at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Conference The Engine of Modernity at Columbia University
Lecture at Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington
Page-Barbour Lectures, University of Virginia
Keynote lecture at conference Description across the Disciplines at Columbia University
Keynote lecture at conference The Total Archive at the University of Cambridge
Keynote Lecture at Conference "Breaking Rules," University of Leiden
Martin Buber Lecture, Israel Academy of Sciences
University of Chicago
Seminar at the University of Chicago
Humanitas Lecture, Oxford University
Seminar at the University of Chicago
Royal Society of London
University of California at Berkeley
Rubinstein Lecture at the Queen Mary University of London