News Release for Biruté Ciplijauskité:
Wisconsin Historical Records Advisory Board selects Biruté Ciplijauskaité as the winner of the 2015 Governor’s Archives Award for Archival Advocacy.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
22 October 2015
Contact:
Hari Jost
kjost@wisc.edu
Professor Emerita Biruté Ciplijauskaité Honored with 2015 Governor’s Archives Award for Archival Advocacy
MADISON, WI – The Wisconsin Historical Records Advisory Board has unanimously selected Biruté Ciplijauskaité, Professor Emerita of Spanish, as the winner of the 2015 Governor’s Archives Award for Archival Advocacy.
About Biruté Ciplijauskaité
Professor Ciplijauskaitė is an internationally known scholar of modern Spanish poetry. She taught in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison starting in 1960 and was a lifetime Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities from 1974 until her retirement in 1997. For the past 17 years, Professor Ciplijauskaité has volunteered at the UW-Madison Department of Special Collections in Memorial Library, where her volunteer efforts on behalf of the Special Collections has helped bring international visibility to its archival materials.
Using her knowledge of modern European languages, she translated and annotated many of the library’s archives in Special Collections, including the astounding correspondence and unpublished memoir of Martha Mosse, a survivor of the Theresianstadt Concentration Camp and great-aunt to UW-Madison’s renowned professor of modern European history, George Mosse. Professor Ciplijauskaité has also donated her own vast correspondence with noted Spanish scholars, novelists, and poets covering some fifty years of notes and letters. She also organized and donated the letters of noted Spanish poet Jorge Guillén, which she translated from Spanish.
Her contributions exhibit the best qualities of the Wisconsin Idea, linking the library’s archives to the State of Wisconsin, and to the world.
About the Archival Advocacy Award
This award honors an individual or organization in Wisconsin or elsewhere for notable contributions to archival programs through organizational leadership, public advocacy, and financial or volunteer support. The nominated individual or organization must be advocating for Wisconsin programs. The activity or contribution being nominated must be for work that is continuing.
The Wisconsin Historical Society and the Wisconsin Historical Records Advisory Board jointly sponsor and provide a panel of judges for the Governor’s Archives Awards annually.