UvA awards honorary medals to three UvA members
Archivist Ernestine Baake, internist-endocrinologist Gabor Linthorst, and literary scholar Marita Mathijsen received an honorary medal from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) last Friday. They were honored for their “exceptional commitment” and “services to the university”.
Each year, the UvA awards honorary medals to individuals who have made “remarkable contributions” to the university. In 2024, for example, the medal was awarded to Folia columnist Han van der Maas. This year, three individuals are being put in the spotlight.
Managing the UvA archives is no small task. Ernestine Baake did it, and is therefore considered “invaluable” for the university’s archiving — and thus for the history of the UvA. She made the archive publicly accessible, allowing it to be used for research purposes. She also ensured the UvA took quicker steps toward digitalization.
The second recipient is Gabor Linthorst, internist-endocrinologist. With “great expertise, enormous dedication, and immense enthusiasm,” he reformed medical education at the UvA. He improved the undergraduate curriculum in Medicine and initiated the role of “teaching PhD students” — physicians in specialist training who focus exclusively on teaching. The UvA praises his “strong commitment.”
The third and final honorary medal was awarded to emeritus professor Marita Mathijsen, “one of the most influential Dutch literary scholars of her generation.” According to the UvA, she has written “a substantial and impressive body of work on nineteenth-century Dutch literature,” including the award-winning biography of Jacob van Lennep. Mathijsen also initiated the creation of a statue of Van Lennep at Haarlemmerplein, and a commemorative writer’s stone for Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken in the Nieuwe Kerk.
Mathijsen manages to make her academic work accessible to a wider audience, says the UvA. “The lecture series on literature that she has organized for fifteen years for the Illustrious School of the Faculty of Humanities draws full houses year after year,” the university writes on its website.
