Lorraine Daston
Director (Since 1995)
PhD, Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago
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 (with Paul Erikson et al.) How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold war Rationality (2014) and (co-edited with Elizabeth Lunbeck), Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), both products of MPIWG Working Groups.
Her current projects include a history of rules, based on her 2014 Lawrence Stone Lectures at Princeton University, the emergence of Big Science and Big Humanities in the context of nineteenth-century archives, and the relationship between moral and natural orders.
She is the recipient of the Pfizer Prize and Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the Schelling Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the Lichtenberg Medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the Luhmann Prize of the University of Bielefeld, and an honorary dotorate of humane letters from Princeton University. In addition to directing Department II of the MPIWG, she is a regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Projects
Commentaries on Mathematical Texts in a Comparative Perspective
I. Science, History of Science, and Modernity
II. The Sciences of the Archive
Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative (ISMI)
IV. Between the Natural and the Human Sciences
Rules: A Short History of What We Live By
V. Science in Circulation: The Exchange of Knowledge, Ninth–Seventeenth Centuries
Cold War Rationality
Collective Observation
History of Scientific Objectivity in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
History of Scientific Observation
How Reason Became Rationality
Natural Law and Laws of Nature
Science Goes to the Archives
VI. The History of Scientific Observation
Selected Publications
Daston, L. (2016). History of science without 'Structure'. In R. J. Richards, & L. Daston (
Read MoreEds. ), Kuhn's 'Structure of scientific revolutions' at fifty: reflections on a science classic (pp. 115-132). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Daston, L. (2016). Die Zukunft der GDNÄ - die GDNÄ der Zukunft. In A. Schanbacher, & E.-M. Neher (
Read MoreEds. ), Menschen und Ideen: die Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte 1822 - 2016 (pp. 11-13). Göttingen: Wallstein.
Daston, L. (2016). Cloud physiognomy. Representations, 135(1), 45-71. doi:10.1525/rep.2016.135.1.45.
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Daston, L. (2016). Authenticity, autopsia, and Theodor Mommsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. In A. Blair, & A.-S. Goeing (
Read MoreEds. ), For the sake of learning: essays in honor of Anthony Grafton. Vol. 2 (pp. 955-973). Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004263314_054.
Daston, L. (2016). When science went modern. The Hedgehog Review, 18(3).
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Daston, L. (2015). Epistemic images. In A. Payne (
Read MoreEd. ), Vision and its instruments: art, science, and technology in early modern Europe (pp. 13-35). University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Daston, L. (2014). The naturalistic fallacy is modern. Isis, 105(3), 579-587. doi:10.1086/678173.
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Erickson, P., Klein, J. L., Daston, L., Lemov, R., Sturm, T., & Gordin, M. D. (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, L. (2012). The sciences of the archive. Osiris, 27(1), 156-187.
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Daston, L. (2008). On scientific observation. Isis, 99(1), 97-110.
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Bookshelf
Events
Premodern Conversations Series
- Institute Event
A History of Rules: Algorithms, Patterns, and Recipes
MORELecture
- Institute Event
Plato’s Cave Revisited: A Conversation about Education Today
MOREExternal/Cooperation Event
- Institute Event
Before Scientific Revolutions: Error and the Fear of Error
MOREPresentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities
Keynote lecture at conference "Description across the Disciplines," Columbia University
Keynote lecture at conference "The Total Archive", University of Cambridge
Keynote Lecture at Conference "Breaking Rules," University of Leiden
Martin Buber Lecture, Israel Academy of Sciences
University of Chicago
Royal Society of London
Humanitas Lecture, Oxford University
University of California at Berkeley
TU Darmstadt
University of Chicago
Rubinstein Lecture: Queen Mary University of London
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid