Robert Sabatino Lopez papers

Robert Sabatino Lopez was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1910. He received a Dottore in Lettere degree from the University of Milan in 1932 and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1942. He taught history and literature at the Teacher Colleges of Cagliari (1933-1934), Pavia (1934-1935), and Genoa (1935-1936), then medieval and economic history as Assistant Professor at the University of Genoa from 1936 to 1938.

After immigrating to the United States in 1939, Lopez served as a research and teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin between 1939 and 1942, as a script editor at the Office of War Information (Voice of America) in 1942-1943, and as a foreign news editor at the Columbia Broadcasting System until 1945.

Lopez taught history at Brooklyn College from 1943 to 1944, and at Columbia University from 1944 to 1945, before he was appointed Assistant Professor at Yale University in 1946. He became Associate Professor of History in 1950, Professor in 1955, Durfee Professor in 1961, and Sterling Professor in 1970. He became a Fellow of Calhoun College in 1947, and served in various administrative capacities. Lopez was instrumental in the founding of the Yale University Graduate School Medieval Studies Program, serving as secretary of the Medieval Studies advisory committee from 1956 to 1961, and as the first chairman of the Medieval Studies Program from 1961 to 1974. He retired from the Yale faculty in June of 1981.

He received honorary degrees from Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, the Université de Montpellier and the Universita di Roma. In June 1985 he was appointed a Fellow of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. A member of many professional associations, he was President of the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Lopez was the author of fourteen books and more than one hundred scholarly papers, including The Birth of Europe (1961), which was translated into seven languages from the original French, and The Commercial Revolution of Europe (1971), which was translated into five languages.

He was married to Claude-Anne Kirschen Lopez, and was the father of two sons, Michael S. Lopez, and Lawrence C. R. Lopez. Robert Sabatino Lopez died July 6, 1986.