Lorraine Daston

Director

Ph.D., Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, Honorarprofessorin für Wissenschaftsgeschichte an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Residence: since July 15, 1995

Profile

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. She is currently completing a book on "Moral and Natural Orders"and co-editing, with Elizabeth Lunbeck from Vanderbilt University, U.S.A., a volume on "Histories of Scientific Observation."

She took her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1979 and since then has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Brandeis, and Göttingen Universities, as well as at the University of Chicago, where she is Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought. She has also held visiting positions in Paris and Vienna and gave the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at the University of Oxford (1999), the West Lectures at Stanford University (2005, and the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University (2002). She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Leopoldina.