Claude-Anne Lopez

Claude-Anne Lopez (October 17, 1920 – December 28, 2012), born Claude-Anne Kirschen, was a Belgian-American writer and scholar who specialized in studies of Benjamin Franklin. Beginning with transcribing papers from French at Yale University, she became an associate editor of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin project and senior research scholar in history at Yale. She was a co-founder of the Friends of Franklin, an association devoted to his works.

She published numerous articles about Franklin, as well as three major studies of him. In her exploration of his private and family life, she was considered "one of the great Franklin scholars of our time." Her book, The Private Franklin (1975), won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in 1976.

Born in Belgium about 1920, Claude-Anne Kirschen grew up with French as her native language. When she was in her late teens, she and her family immigrated as refugees to the United States in 1940 to escape Nazi occupation after the German invasion during World War II. They settled in New York City.

Kirschen worked in the French section of the Office of War Information in New York. There she met her future husband, Roberto Sabatino Lopez (1910-1986), a wartime refugee immigrant from Italy.

Kirschen married Robert S. Lopez in 1946. That year they moved to New Haven, Connecticut, as he had been offered a position as assistant professor at Yale University. They had two sons, Michael and Lawrence.

In the 1950s, Yale began a project in collaboration with the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, to publish the papers of Benjamin Franklin. (Thirty-seven volumes had been published by 2005.)

Lopez began working on the project, transcribing and translating papers from French, and later from Italian and German. Recognizing that she had insights to contribute, she published some articles on Franklin's personal life and was promoted to editor.

...
Wikipedia