Biography:Lisbet Rausing

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Dame

Lisbet Rausing

Born (1960-06-09) 9 June 1960 (age 65)
Lund, Sweden
NationalitySwedish[1]
CitizenshipUnited Kingdom[1]
Education
OccupationScience historian, philanthropist
Spouse(s)Peter Baldwin
Parent(s)
  • Hans Rausing
  • Märit Rausing
Relatives
  • Ruben Rausing (paternal grandfather)
  • Hans Kristian Rausing (brother)
  • Sigrid Rausing (sister)

Dame Anna Lisbet Kristina Rausing (born 9 June 1960) is a science historian and philanthropist. She is a co-founder of the Arcadia Fund,[2] one of the UK's largest philanthropic foundations.

Early life

Anna Lisbet Kristina Rausing, born on 9 June 1960, in Lund, Sweden, is a member of the wealthy Swedish Rausing family. She is the eldest child and daughter of Hans (1926–2019) and Märit Rausing, and has one sister, Sigrid Rausing (born 1962) and one brother, Sir Hans Kristian Rausing (born 1963). Her grandfather, Ruben Rausing (1895–1983), was co-founder of the Swedish multinational food packaging company Tetra Pak.[3]

Rausing earned a B.A. degree summa cum laude in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. She later pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, where she received a M.A. degree in History in 1987, followed by a Ph.D. in the same field in 1993.

Career

Harvard University Press published Rausing's scholarly biography of Carl Linnaeus, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation[4] in 1999. Throughout her career she has published a range of articles on related subjects in scholarly journals including Isis, Representations,[5] Configurations,[6] and History of Political Economy.[7] She has also contributed to the Financial Times and The Sunday Telegraph, and has published a number of pieces on the evolution of archive digitization[8] and on open access to scholarship.[9]

Rausing is a senior research fellow at King's College. She holds honorary doctorates from Uppsala University and SOAS.[10] She is also an honorary fellow of the British Academy,[11] the Linnean Society,[12] the Royal Historical Society,[13] The Royal Society of Biology[14] and the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry.[15] She was elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers[16] (2005–2011) and Yad Hanadiv Advisory Committee (2001–2011). She served on the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Advisory Board from 2012 to 2022.

Philanthropy

Rausing with her husband Peter Baldwin

Lisbet Rausing co-founded the Arcadia Fund[17] in 2001 with her husband Professor Peter Baldwin. As of March 2022, the Fund has made grant commitments of over $919 million to charities and scholarly institutions globally that preserve cultural heritage and the environment and promote open access.[18] Arcadia-funded projects include the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities,[19] the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library[20] and Fauna & Flora International's Halcyon Land and Sea fund. They are listed as one of the biggest benefactors to the Wikimedia Foundation[21] and donated $5 million to the Wikimedia endowment in 2017[22] after Baldwin joined its advisory board.[23]

Rausing and Baldwin also founded Lund Trust. Since 2002 Lund Trust has given more than $77.7 million to charities in the UK and internationally.[24]

In 2024, Rausing donated £500,000 to the Labour Party.[25]

In the 2025 Birthday Honours, Rausing was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) "for services to the art".[26]

See also

  • Rausing family

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Anna Lisbet Kristina RAUSING - British Government website Companies House
  2. "About Arcadia - Arcadia". http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk/about-arcadia/about-arcadia.aspx. 
  3. The milk of human kindness: Meet the Rausings - website of the British online newspaper The Independent
  4. Koerner, Lisbet (1999). Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Harvard: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-09745-2. https://archive.org/details/linnaeusnaturena00koer_0. 
  5. "Linnaeus' Floral Transplants." Representations, 47 (1994)
  6. "Women and utility in Enlightenment science" Configurations, 3 (1995)
  7. "Underwriting the Oeconomy: Linnaeus on Nature and Mind." History of Political Economy supplement to volume 35 (2003)
  8. "Do Libraries Dream of Electric Sheep?" Going Digital: Evolutionary and Revolutionary Aspects of Digitization Nobel Symposium 147: Stockholm, 2011) and in Logos, 21(2010) and "Toward a new Alexandria: Imagining the Future of Libraries." The New Republic (12 March 2010)
  9. "Toward a new Alexandria: Imagining the Future of Libraries." The New Republic 12 March 2010 see also https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/toward-new-alexandria/ accessed 18 February 2023
  10. "SOAS Honorary Fellows: Dr Lisbet Rausing". https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/fellows/dr-lisbet-rausing/. 
  11. "Honorary Fellows - British Academy". Archived on 2015-06-29. Error: If you specify |archivedate=, you must also specify |archiveurl=. http://www.britac.ac.uk/fellowship/directory/hon.cfm. Retrieved 2015-06-16.  accessed 03 December 2015
  12. "Royal Patrons and Honorary Fellows". http://www.linnean.org/fellows/Royal+Patrons+and+Honorary+Fellows. 
  13. "Royal Historical Society, Fellows, R". Archived on 2015-12-22. Error: If you specify |archivedate=, you must also specify |archiveurl=. http://5hm1h4aktue2uejbs1hsqt31.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/RHS-Fellows-R.pdf. Retrieved 2015-12-21.  accessed 03 December 2015
  14. "Honorary Fellows L-R". http://www.rsb.org.uk/membership/individual-membership/fellowship-frsb/honorary-fellows/l-r. 
  15. "KSLA in English". http://www.ksla.se/en/. 
  16. http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/06.16/03-overseers.html accessed 03.December 2015
  17. arcadiafund.org.uk
  18. "Arcadia's 2021 annual report". https://www.arcadiafund.org.uk/reports/annual-report-2021. 
  19. "Endangered Languages Documentation Programme". http://www.eldp.net/. [title missing]
  20. http://eap.bl.uk/index.a4d accessed 4 December 2015
  21. Wikipedia 15 Contributors Retrieved January 15, 2016.
  22. wmf:Resolution:Approval of Endowment funding (Fiscal Year 2016-2017) and matching $5 million gift from Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing
  23. "Peter Baldwin, professor and philanthropist, is appointed to the Wikimedia Endowment Advisory Board". 2016-09-09. https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/09/09/peter-baldwin-endowment-board/. 
  24. "Lund Trust website". https://lundtrust.org.uk/. 
  25. "Top donors to political parties in United Kingdom for 2024 | DonationWatch". https://donation.watch/en/unitedkingdom/2024/donors. 
  26. No. 64759. 14 June 2025. p. B9. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/64759/supplement/B9