Lorraine Jenifer Daston (born June 9, 1951) is an American historian of science. She is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and 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. She is a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

Education

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. In 2002, she delivered two Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, in which she traced theoretical conceptions of nature in several literary and philosophical works. In 2006, she gave the British Academy's Master-Mind Lecture. Daston was appointed the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in the History of Ideas at the University of Oxford for 2012-2013. She has also served as Oxford's Isaiah Berlin Lecturer in the History of Ideas April-May 1999. Daston was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2010. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Princeton University in 2013. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017. In 2018, she received the Dan David Prize. In 2024 she was awarded the Balzan Prize for "History of Modern and Contemporary Science". She is on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry. She is a contributor to the London Review of Books.

Personal life

Daston married the German psychologist and social scientist Gerd Gigerenzer.

Monographs

As editor

Articles (selection)

Quotes

"“The-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” goes a long way to explain most scientific controversies I’m familiar with; so much so, that one wonders why it is that such debates so quickly and permanently become polemically polarized. The long after-life of the medieval disputation-cum-duel?.."