Celebrating Recent Work by Lorraine Daston

Wednesday, January 24, 2024
6:15pm — 7:45pm ET
Columbia Journalism School

🔬

---

Columbia Global Reports & The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities invite you to a conversation celebrating Lorraine Daston’s book Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate on Wednesday, January 24 at 6:15pm in the World Room (room 305) at Pulitzer Hall.

Daston will be joined by William Deringer, Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Alma Steingart, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University. The conversation will be moderated by Columbia Global Reports Director, Nicholas Lemann, with welcome remarks from Eileen Gillooly, Executive Director of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

---

This event is free to attend, but registration is required. A Q&A and book signing will follow.
Rivals will be available for purchase at the event from Book Culture.

---

Why is the scientific community so unified?

In the last 350-odd years, the international “scientific community” has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global crises: disastrous climate change, and a deadly pandemic. How did “the scientific community” come into existence, and why does it work?

Historian of science Lorraine Daston’s Rivals is an attempt to answer these questions in the form of a brief historical overview, from the late seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries, through the creation of two enormous projects—the Carte du Ciel, or the great star map, and the International Cloud Atlas, pioneered by the World Meteorological Organization after World War II. These new models of intergovernmental collaboration and global observation networks would later make the mounting evidence of planetary phenomena like climate change possible.

 

This book is published with support from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

“Celebrating Recent Work by Lorraine Daston” is presented as part of the New Books in the Society of Fellows series

Register Here