Holocaust survivor, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel will deliver Washington University’s 150th Commencement address, Chancellor Mark Wrighton announced Tuesday evening.

Wiesel will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University. His speech, titled “Knowledge and Ethics,” will be delivered to the graduates from the University’s four undergraduate colleges and all graduate and professional programs.

“I am deeply honored that Elie Wiesel has agreed to deliver the Commencement address to this year’s graduates,” Wrighton said in a news release. “Professor Wiesel is a remarkable scholar who has dedicated his life to promoting peace. I am confident that his message will serve as an inspiration to our outstanding graduates.”

Wiesel has given three Assembly Series lectures at the University since 1970.

Wrighton made the announcement at the Senior Class Toast in the Brookings Quadrangle. The Class of 2011 responded with loud applause.

“It’s exciting to have a name that everybody on campus recognizes, at least it seemed like the majority of the senior class recognized,” senior Nate Maslak said. “I don’t know too much about him, but I read his book in high school, and I know a lot of people did, so it’s exciting. It’s exciting to have a Nobel laureate.”

The selection of a well-known speaker was important to the senior class after the past two Commencement speakers, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp, were not immediately recognizable to many members of the University community.

“I started to kind of get a guess when he [the chancellor] was mentioning all of the awards….I think it was the George Bush one where I was thinking ‘Wow, it would be so cool if Elie Wiesel came here,’” Senior Class President Alex Kiles said. “I was actually talking to one of my friends about reading ‘Night’ before he gets here….I had never heard of the speaker last year because he came from the science realm, so I’m really excited that it’s someone I heard of and revere.”

Students were enthusiastic to be so familiar with the speaker.

“I was really afraid that it would be a speaker that I really didn’t know anything about or had [never] even heard of,” senior Katie Gavinski said. “Not only is it someone that I’ve heard and read the books from, I’m just really excited to have someone who has been through so much coming to talk to us [to] share our experience with us.”

The Nobel laureate was born in 1928 in Transylvania (present-day Romania). Nazis deported him and his family to Auschwitz when he was just 15 years old. Both of his parents and his youngest sister died in concentration camps. His two older sisters survived.

Wiesel is a survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. His memoir “Night,” published in 1958, is an internationally acclaimed account of his experiences during the Holocaust. The book has been translated into more than 30 languages.

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. After winning the Prize, he and his wife created The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization dedicated to combating indifference, intolerance and injustice.

He has been the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University since 1976 and is a member of the religion and philosophy departments. He has been awarded more than 100 honorary degrees.

Commencement will begin at 8:30 a.m. on May 20 in the Brookings Quadrangle.