Lorraine Daston (born June 9, 1951 in

East Lansing, Michigan East Lansing is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan. Most of the city lies within Ingham County, Michigan, Ingham County with a smaller portion extending north into Clinton County, Michigan, Clinton County. At the 2020 United States Census, 2020 ...

) is an American

historian of science The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal. Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopo ...

. Director emerita of the

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (German: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte) is a scientific research institute founded in March 1994. It is dedicated to addressing fundamental questions of the history of knowledg ...

(MPIWG) in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

, and visiting professor in the

Committee on Social Thought The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought is one of several PhD-granting committees at the University of Chicago. It was started in 1941 by historian John Ulric Nef along with economist Frank Knight, anthropologist Robert Redfield, and Univers ...

at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, 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 The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

. She is a permanent fellow at the

Berlin Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (german: Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) is an interdisciplinary institute founded in 1981 in Grunewald, Berlin, Germany, dedicated to research projects in the natural and social sciences. It is modeled ...

Education

*Study of history and science at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

(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 I. Bernard Cohen (1 March 1914 – 20 June 2003) was the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the author of many books on the history of science and, in particular, Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin. C ...

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 Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual his ...

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

for 2013. She has also held Oxford's

Isaiah Berlin Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks ...

Visiting Professorship in Intellectual History. In 2002, she delivered two Tanner Lectures at

, in which she traced theoretical conceptions of nature in several literary and philosophical work

In 2006 she gave the

British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars span ...

's Master-Mind Lecture. She is on the editorial board of ''

Critical Inquiry ''Critical Inquiry'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Department of English Language and Literature (University of Chicago). While the topics and historic ...

''. Daston was awarded the

Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany The Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (german: Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or , BVO) is the only federal decoration of Germany. It is awarded for special achievements in political, economic, cultural, intellect ...

in 2010. She was elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

in 2017. In 2018 she received the

Dan David Prize The Dan David Prize is a major international award that recognizes and supports outstanding contributions to the study of history and other disciplines that shed light on the human past. It awards nine prizes of $300,000 each year to outstanding ...

.Laureates 2018
Retrieved January 22, 2019. She is married to the German psychologist and social scientist

Gerd Gigerenzer Gerd Gigerenzer (born 3 September 1947) is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making. Gigerenzer is director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max ...

Bibliography

* ''Classical Probability in the Enlightenment'' (1988) * "The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment" (1993) * ''Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750'' (with

Katharine Park Katharine Park is a Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. She specializes in the history of gender, sexuality, and the female body in medieval and Renaissance Europe, as well as categories and practices of experience ...

, 1998) * "Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective" (1999) * ''Biographies of Scientific Objects'' (co-editor, 2000) * ''Eine kurze Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Aufmerksamkeit'' (2001) * ''Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen: zur Geschichte der Rationalität'' (2001)
"The Morality of Natural Orders: The Power of Medea" and "Nature's Customs versus Nature's Laws"
(Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, 2002) * ''The Moral Authority of Nature'' (co-editor, 2003) * "The Disciplines of Attention," in David E. Wellbery, ed., ''A New History of German Literature'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Reference Library, 2005)
"Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment"
(Lecture at McGill University, 2006) * ''Objectivity'' (with

Peter Galison Peter Louis Galison (born May 17, 1955, New York) is an American historian and philosopher of science. He is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University. Biography Galison received his Ph. ...

, Boston: Zone Books, 2007) * ''Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe'' (co-editor, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)
"Rules Rule: How Enlightenment Reason Became Cold War Rationality"
(Video of Lecture at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2010) * ''Histories of scientific observation'' (with Elizabeth Lunbeck, Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2011) * ''Before the Two Cultures: Big Science and Big Humanities in the Nineteenth Century'' (Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Volume IX, No. 1. 2015) * ''Against Nature'' (2019) * * ''Rules: A Short History of What We Live By'' (

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial su ...

, 2022)

References

External links

Lorraine Daston MPIWG profile pageThe Observer (Article about Daston in MaxPlanckResearch, magazine of the Max Planck Society 2012
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Daston, Lorraine Living people Historians of science Knights Commander of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class) Intellectual historians University of Chicago faculty 1951 births American women historians Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the American Philosophical Society Members of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy Harvard University alumni Alumni of the University of Cambridge 21st-century American women Scientific American people Max Planck Institute directors People from East Lansing, Michigan