Bio-bibliography

Germany/Usa

Lorraine Daston

2024 Balzan Prize for History of Modern and Contemporary Science

For the extent, originality and variety of her work, which has drawn on a wide range of scientific fields to highlight the mental representations and values underlying research activity; for the number and quality of her articles and books, which have opened up new paths in the history and epistemology of sciences; for her contribution to the training of generations of researchers; and for her support - as head of prestigious institutions - for innovative research projects.

Lorraine Daston studied at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and was awarded her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 1979.

She has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Brandeis, Göttingen, and Chicago and since 1995 has been Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She is also a regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Permanent Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Her work spans a broad range of topics in the early modern and modern history of science, including probability and statistics, wonders and the order of nature, scientific images, objectivity and other epistemic virtues, quantification, observation, algorithms, scientific archives, natural laws, the scientific community since 1700, and the moral authority of nature. The theme that unites all of her work is the history of rationality, both its ideals and practices.

She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Leopoldina, and Corresponding Member of the British Academy and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Among the awards that have recognized her work are the Pfizer Prize for best book in the history of science published in English, the Bielefeld Science Prize, the Sarton Medal of the History of Science, the Dan David Prize, and the Heineken Prize in History.

Significant publications:

Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2023).

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

Against Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).

(with Paul Erikson et al.). How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

(with Peter Galison). Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

(with Katharine Park). Wonders and the Order of Nature (1150-1750) (New York: Zone Books, 1998).

Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Re-issued in paperback with new preface in Princeton Classic series, 2023).