Lorraine Daston

Lorraine Daston is a German-American historian of science noted for her work on the history of scientific observation, objectivity, and probability from the early modern period to the twentieth century. She has held leading positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the University of Chicago, and the Institute for Advanced Study, and has collaborated widely with scholars across Harvard University, Princeton University, Cambridge University, and Oxford networks. Her interdisciplinary scholarship links historians, philosophers, scientists, and institutions such as the Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Early life and education

Born in Nuremberg, Daston studied at the University of Chicago where she completed undergraduate work connected to faculty in Chicago School (sociology), Chicago School (economics), and the history program intersecting with scholars linked to Newberry Library and Oriental Institute (Chicago). She pursued graduate study at Wolfson College, Oxford and the University of Oxford, engaging with historians affiliated with All Souls College, Balliol College, and the History of Science Museum, Oxford. Her doctoral work drew upon manuscript collections at the Bodleian Library, archives at the British Library, and holdings related to figures like Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, Galileo Galilei, and Robert Boyle.

Academic career and positions

Daston served on the faculty of the University of Chicago in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of History, interacting with centers such as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. She was a director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin where she led projects in collaboration with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her fellowships include appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the German Historical Institute. She has held visiting professorships and lectureships at Yale University, Columbia University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Cambridge, and participated in conferences at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the European Society for the History of Science.

Research and contributions

Daston’s research addresses the emergence of scientific norms such as objectivity, observation, and attention across epochs tied to intellectuals like Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Michel Foucault. She has traced networks of print and correspondence involving Pierre-Simon Laplace, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Antoine Lavoisier, Carl Linnaeus, and Alexander von Humboldt. Her work engages methodologies developed by historians associated with Fernand Braudel, Quentin Skinner, E. P. Thompson, Robert K. Merton, and Thomas Kuhn and dialogues with philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, Michael Friedman, and Nancy Cartwright. Daston has reconstructed practices at institutions including the Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences, the Vatican Library, the United States National Institutes of Health, and museum laboratories like the Natural History Museum, London and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. She has contributed to understanding probabilistic reasoning through studies of figures such as Jacob Bernoulli, Pierre de Fermat, Blaise Pascal, Andrey Kolmogorov, and Thomas Bayes, and connected those histories to twentieth-century debates involving Karl Pearson, Ronald Fisher, and Jerzy Neyman.

Major publications

Daston has authored and edited numerous influential books and essays, collaborating with scholars like Peter Galison, Mary Poovey, Peter Dear, Geoffrey Lloyd, and Adrian Johns. Major works include titles addressing objectivity and scientific practice, published alongside series from presses such as Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Chicago Press, Cambridge University Press, and MIT Press. Her notable monographs and edited volumes examine themes present in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, John Dee, Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Andreas Vesalius, Albrecht Dürer, and Johannes Kepler. She has contributed chapters to handbooks edited by figures from Oxford University Press and Routledge and articles in journals including the Isis (journal), Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, British Journal for the History of Science, Centaurus, and Social Studies of Science.

Awards and honors

Daston’s honors include membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, election to the American Philosophical Society, and distinctions from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation (fellowship-like recognitions), and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has received prizes from organizations such as the History of Science Society, the British Society for the History of Science, the Max Planck Society, and the Royal Historical Society. Her leadership roles and honors encompass honorary degrees from universities including Harvard University, University of Oxford, Yale University, and University College London, and invitations to deliver named lectures at institutions like the Gifford Lectures, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and the Sarton Memorial Lecture.

Category:Historians of science Category:German-American academics