Lorraine Daston has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence of scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. Books include Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (with Katharine Park), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, Biographies of Scientific Objects, (with Peter Galison), Objectivity, and (co-edited with Elizabeth Lunbeck, Histories of Scientific Observation. Her recent book is Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022). Her book, Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (Columbia Global Reports, 2023) was the subject of a book panel cosponsored by the Society of Fellows in January 2024, chaired by Nicholas Lemann with commentators Alma Steingart (Columbia) and SF alumnus Will Deringer (MIT).

She is director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, a visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.