Marixa Lasso

Marixa Lasso is an historian and the first director of Panama’s Center for the Study of History, Anthropology and Culture (CIHAC AIP), which is affiliated with the Ministry of Culture. She is the author of the books Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution (2007) and Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (2019). Erased was published in Spanish by Critica and in Chinese by Guangdong People’s Press and is the recipient of the American Historical Association’s Friedrich Katz Prize in Latin American and Caribbean History and the 2019 William M. LeoGrande Prize.

She is a member of the Hispanic American Historical Review editorial board and has written academic articles for several books and prestigious international scientific journals, as well as opinion articles for newspapers such as the Washington Post, El Espectador, La Prensa, and Estrella de Panamá.

Dr. Lasso is a Fulbright recipient and has received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. During the fall of 2016, she was the Sheila Biddle Fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard. She has taught at universities in the U.S. and Colombia and is an associate researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.