Dr Allan Chapman

We are saddened to share the news that Allan Chapman, an Associate Member of the History Faculty, died on 21 January 2026.  Allan was born in 1946 and studied for his DPhil in History of Science at Wadham College, having gained his first degree in History from Lancaster University in 1972. Over half a century, Allan tutored numerous undergraduate students at Oxford, and supervised almost 100 research theses in Part II of the MChem degree programme. His support of history of science at Oxford was an important factor in its continuing presence in the Faculty in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Allan was an erudite - and always entertaining - public speaker. His expertise ranged across a number of scientific fields but his chief areas of interest were the history of astronomy, the history of precision instrumentation and the history of Oxford science. His monograph Dividing the Circle: the Development of Critical Angular Measurement in Astronomy 1500-1800 (1990) remains a standard work in the history of scientific instrument-making, while his great admiration for Robert Hooke can be seen in his England's Leonardo: Robert Hooke and the Seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution (2004) and the edited collection Robert Hooke and the English Renaissance (2005).