[4] His doctoral advisor at Glasgow was Andrew Kent, and his thesis subject was the chemistry textbooks used in European universities in the 17th century.
[2] In 1967, William Coleman and Harry Woolf hired Hannaway to join them at the Johns Hopkins University's new department of the history of science, and he remained there through the end of his career.
[4] Hannaway was particularly known among historians of science for his 1975 book The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry.
[4] His work covered historical figures such as Oswald Croll, Andreas Libavius, Tycho Brahe, Georgius Agricola, Ira Remsen, and Herbert Hoover.
[6] He received the 1988 Derek Price/Rod Webster Prize from the History of Science Society for his 1986 Isis paper "Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe"[7] and the 1991 Dexter Award from the American Chemical Society,[4] for which he delivered an address on Herbert Hoover's translation of De Re Metallica.