Frank A. Kafker, former editor of French Historical Studies, died on April 1, 2020, of complications arising from Parkinson's disease. Kafker figured among the luminaries of eighteenth-century studies, specializing in the French Enlightenment, the Revolution, and the relationship between the two.
Born in Brooklyn to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants during the Depression and coming of age just after World War II, Kafker entered academic life at a time of expansion of the American academy and professoriat and became a historian in the 1950s and early 1960s during a tremendously fertile moment for the discipline, when intellectual and social history and French studies came to the fore. Across the four decades of his career, he made signal contributions to the broad renewal of historiography of the French Enlightenment and French Revolution in postwar American research universities. He became a pioneer in his pursuit of manuscript sources, his deployment...
