Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and regular visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought. Her work focuses on the history of rationality, especially but not exclusively scientific rationality. She has written on the history of wonder, objectivity, observation, the moral authority of nature, probability, Cold War rationality, and scientific modernity. Her current book projects are a history of rules and an inquiry into the relationship between the moral and natural orders.

Selected Recent Publications

Against Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019); German translation: Gegen die Natur, (Berlin: Verlag Matthes& Seitz, 2018).

(ed.), Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

“The Coup d’Oeil: On a Mode of Understanding,” Critical Inquiry 45(2019): 307-331.

“The History of Science and the History of Knowledge,” KNOW 1(2017): 1-25.

“When Science Went Modern,” Hedgehog Review 18(2016): 18-32.

Further Information and links to publications at:

https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/users/ldaston