Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke
Born	(1944-01-22) January 22, 1944 (age 81) Rotterdam, Netherlands
Occupation(s)	Historian of science and biographer
Academic background
Education	University of Groningen Princeton University University of Oxford
Academic work
Discipline	History of science
Sub-discipline	Geology Evolutionary thought Science & religion
Institutions	Göttingen University (1993–2012) Washington and Lee University (2012–)

Nicolaas Adrianus Rupke (born 22 January 1944 in Rotterdam) is a Dutch historian of science and biographer, who began his academic career as a marine geologist.^[1]

He studied biology and geology at the university of Groningen and geology and the history of science at Princeton and Oxford. Early in his studies, Rupke was a Christian and proponent of Flood geology,^[2] but later came to reject this position. When in 1977 he was elected to a Wolfson College, Oxford research position in the history of science, Rupke made this subject his full-time occupation. A series of similar international research posts followed, until in 1993 he took up a professorship at Göttingen University to teach the history of science and medicine.^[3] In 2009, Rupke was awarded a Lower Saxony research chair.^[4] In 2012, he took up an endowed professorship at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, USA.

Rupke is known for his studies of late-modern biology, geology and science & religion. With an interest in the biographical approach, he restored to their contemporary prominence several nineteenth-century scientists, most important among them Richard Owen who well before the appearance of The Origin of Species developed a naturalistic theory of evolution, albeit a non-Darwinian one.^[5]

Studies of Alexander von Humboldt came next,^[6] in which Rupke developed what he terms the metabiographical approach by exploring how a famous life – in this case Humboldt's – may be multiply retold and reconstructed as part of different belief systems and memory cultures.^[7]

Rupke is a fellow of Germany's National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina^[8] and of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.^[3]

• Distinctive Properties of Turbiditic and Hemipelagic Mud Layers (with Daniel J. Stanley). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974.
• The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the English School of Geology (1814–1849). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.^[9] ISBN 0198229070
• Vivisection in Historical Perspective (ed.). London, Croom Helm, 1987; Routledge, 1988. ISBN 0415050219
• Science, Politics and the Public Good (ed.). London: Macmillan, 1988.
• Medical Geography in Historical Perspective (ed.). London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, 2000. ISBN 0854840729
• Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (revised ed. of Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist, New Haven and London: Yale, 1994, ISBN 978-0300058208) Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
• Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (corrected edition). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Rupke, Nicolaas A. (2005). 1st edition. Peter Lang. ISBN 3631539320.
• Eminent Lives in Twentieth-Century Science and Religion (ed.) (revised and much expanded edition). Frankurt a.M.: Lang, 2009. Rupke, Nicolaas A. (2007). 2007 edition. Peter Lang. ISBN 9783631568033.
• Albrecht von Haller im Göttingen der Aufklärung (ed. with Norbert Elsner [de]). Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009.

• Academic homepage.
• Faculty listing, Göttingen University.