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.
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, 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. In 2009, Rupke was awarded a Lower Saxony research chair. 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.
Studies of Alexander von Humboldt came next, in which Rupke developed what he terms the metabiographical approach by exploring how a famous life â in this case Humboldt's â may be multiply retold and reconstructed as part of different belief systems and memory cultures.
Rupke is a fellow of Germany's National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.