Former UW-Madison Spanish professor Birute Ciplijauskaite won the 2015 Wednesday, a unanimous selection by the Wisconsin Historical Records Advisory Board.
The award honors both individuals and organizations throughout the state that contribute to archival programs through public advocacy, organizational leadership and financial or volunteer support, according to a UW-Madison release.
Ciplijauskaite is known internationally as a scholar of modern Spanish poetry and started teaching in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UW-Madison in 1960. She started working as a lifetime senior fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities from 1974 until her retirement in 1998.
Through work with the George L. Mosse Program in History, Ciplijauskaite translated and annotated the memoirs of two Theresienstadt concentration camp survivors, Eva Noack Mosse and Martha Mosse.
Since then, Ciplijauskaite has volunteered at the UW-Madison Department of Special Collections in Memorial Library to bring international attention to its archival materials, according to the release.
UW-Madison Professor and Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities Susan Stanford Friedman said Ciplijauskaite’s "contributions exhibit the best qualities of the Wisconsin Idea, linking the library's archives to the State of Wisconsin, and to the world."
