Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke

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Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke

Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke (born January 22, 1944 in Rotterdam ) is a Dutch historian of science and professor at Washington and Lee University .

Life

Rupke studied biology and geology at the University of Groningen and geology and history of science at Princeton and at Wolfson College of the University of Oxford . He began his academic career as a marine geologist. When he received a research position in the history of science at Wolfson College, Oxford in 1977 , he switched to this field. In the following years he held a number of similar international research positions until he took over a professorship for the history of medicine and (since 1997) the history of science at the University of Göttingen in 1993 . In 2009 Rupke was awarded a Lower Saxony professorship for the history of science. Since January 2012 Rupke has been "Johnson Professor of History" at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia (USA).

Rupke is the author of studies on the history of biology, geology and the relationship between natural sciences and religion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Based on his interest in a biographical approach, he rehabilitated several naturalists of this period by reconstructing their contemporary meaning, most notably Richard Owen , who had a naturalistic, albeit non-Darwinian, theory even before the appearance of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species evolved.

Rupke then researched Alexander von Humboldt and developed what he called the metabiographical approach by examining how a famous life - in this case Humboldt - can be told in multiple ways and reconstructed as part of different belief systems and cultures of remembrance .

He is currently working on a number of non-Darwinist evolutionary biologists of the 19th and 20th centuries - on the structuralist tradition in biology - starting with the Göttingen medical professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach .

Rupke is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (since 2001) and the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen .

Publications (selection)

  • with Daniel J. Stanley: Distinctive Properties of Turbiditic and Hemipelagic Mud Layers. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC 1974.
  • The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1983, ISBN 0-19-822907-0 .
  • as editor: Vivisection in Historical Perspective. Croom Helm, London 1987; Routledge, 1988, ISBN 0-415-05021-9 .
  • as editor: Science, Politics and the Public Good. Macmillan, London 1988, ISBN 0-333-44159-1 .
  • as Ed .: Medical Geography in Historical Perspective. Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine, London 2000, ISBN 0-85484-072-9 .
  • Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (revised edition by Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist. Yale, New Haven / London 1994) University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 2009, ISBN 978-0-226-73177-3 .
  • Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (revised edition). University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 2008, ISBN 978-0-226-73149-0 .
  • as editor: Eminent Lives in Twentieth-Century Science and Religion. (revised and greatly expanded edition). Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-631-58120-9 .
  • with Norbert Elsner (Ed.): Albrecht von Haller in the Göttingen of the Enlightenment. Wallstein, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8353-0573-1 .

literature

  • Nicolaas Rupke: The history of the natural sciences as life stories. In: Yearbook of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. 2005, pp. 313–322 (autobiographical abstract).
  • Who is Who in the World 2011. 28th Edition.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ WLU website ( Memento of the original from October 10, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wlu.edu
  2. ↑ Member entry by Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke (with picture and CV) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on May 24, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Rupke, Nicolaas Adrianus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rupke, Nicolaas A.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch science historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 22, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Rotterdam