This biography of Anne Hagopian was sourced from the Harvard Plate Stacks website on January 14, 2024. It was written by Elizabeth Coquillette, Curatorial Assistant at the Harvard Plate Stacks, in 2022. Please note that this information may have been updated since it was added to our database; for the most current information, check their website at https://platestacks.cfa.harvard.edu.
Born: 1927, United States
Died: 13 October 2008
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Ann van Buren
Anne Hagopian van Buren (1927-2008) did computing work at the HCO from c.1945-c.1950 as an undergraduate student in astronomy at Radcliffe College.1
She entered Radcliffe College to study astronomy after winning a scholarship in 1944 through the third annual Science Talent Search for high school students, a competition which continues through the present day.2 After graduating, she left astronomy to marry theologian Paul van Buren and have four children.3 She then turned to art history, earning her PhD in art history from Bryn Mawr College in 1970 and going on to teach at Tufts University. She is remembered as a prominent expert in 14th and 15th Netherlandish art who proudly used her scientific training to enhance her art history research.4
Works cited
1-Lindsay Smith Zrull, “Women in Glass: Women at the Harvard Observatory during the Era of Astronomical Glass Plate Photography, 1875-1975,” Journal of the History of Astronomy, vol. 52, no. 2 (2021): 133.
2- “Anne Hagopian (1927-2008), 1944: Object Details,” Smithsonian Institution Libraries and Archives.; “Science: Boy & Girl Scientists,” Time Magazine, March 20, 1944.
3- Elizabeth J. Moodey, “In Memoriam: Anne Hagopian van Buren,” Historians of Netherlandish Art.
4- Ibid.