A Metabiography of Alexander von Humboldt

Authors

  • Nicolaas A. Rupke

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18443/74

Keywords:

Metabiography

Abstract

Abstract

The author's recently published monograph on Alexander von Humboldt describes the multiple images of this great cultural icon. The book is a metabiographical study that shows how from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day Humboldt has served as a nucleus of crystallisation for a variety of successive socio-political ideologies, each producing its own distinctive representation of him. The historiographical implications of this biographical diversity are profound and support current attempts to understand historical scholarship in terms of memory cultures.

Author Biography

Nicolaas A. Rupke

Prof. Dr., is Director, Institute for the History of Science, Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany. Educated at Groningen (BSc, 1968) and Princeton (PhD, 1972) Universities, he held research fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, Oxford University, Tübingen University, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, the Welcome Institute for the History of Medicine, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Canberra. He is the author of several scientific biographies, including a study of the Oxford geologist William Buckland, The Great Chain of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) and of the London biologist Richard Owen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). He currently works on „Eminent lives in twentieth-century science-and-religion“.

Downloads

How to Cite

Rupke, N. A. (2006). A Metabiography of Alexander von Humboldt . HiN - Alexander Von Humboldt in the Net. International Review for Humboldt Studies, 7(12), 69–72. https://doi.org/10.18443/74

Issue

Vol. 7 No. 12 (2006)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2006 Nicolaas A. Rupke

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

HiN operates under a Creative Commons-Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits the reproduction of articles, free of charge, for non-commercial use only and with the appropriate citation information. All authors publishing with HiN accept these terms of publication.

Authors retain the copyright for their articles and reviews. Copyright of the layout and design of HiN articles remains with the journal and cannot be used in other publications.