Robert S. Lopez

Roberto Sabatino Lopez (October 8, 1910 – July 6, 1986) was an Italian-born American historian of medieval European economic history. He taught for many years at Yale University as a Sterling Professor of History. Roberto Sabatino Lopez was born in Genoa, Italy. His family were Sephardi Jews. He graduated from the University of Milan in 1932 and taught medieval history at various universities, serving at one point as Chair of History at the University of Genoa. Lopez fled Benito Mussolini's regime for England in 1939, where he came under the influence of Cecil Roth. Robert L. Reynolds, a friend of Lopez, informed him that an American Ph.D. was necessary to find tenure at an American university, and through the influence of Reynolds, Lopez enrolled in the graduate history program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here he gained a Ph.D. in 1942. From 1942 to 1944 Lopez worked for Voice of America and in the Italian section of the Office of War Information in New York City. There he met his future wife, Claude-Anne Kirschen, a wartime refugee from Belgium who had come to New York with her family in 1940.