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 the 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 most recent book is Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022).

She is Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Permanent Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

She is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin and Visiting Professor, Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.