Asunción Lavrin

Born in Havana and a member of the first class of women admitted to Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Lavrin has set the benchmarks (in well over 110 publications in English and Spanish) for the study of women and gender in colonial Mexico and twentieth century Latin America. Her work ranges from women and sexuality in colonial Latin America to the study of twentieth century feminism in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay 1890-1940. She has earned four prizes for  published articles, and the Thomas McGann Prize for Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico  (2008) and has edited four other titles on Latin American women's  history, sexuality and marriage as well as religious women's' writings prior to 1800..  She has  served as  senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Women's History. and a History of Women in Spain and Latin America (published in Spanish in Spain). She has been the recipient of research awards from the Social Science Research Council, The American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment of the Humanities (1980-81 and 1993-94) and  the Organization of American States. She  has co-directed two NEH Summer Institutes in 2000 and 2002.  In 2002 she received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for studying masculinities in the Mendicant Orders in colonial Mexico. In 2009 Lavrin received the Distinguished Service Award from the Conference on Latin American History, an organization she presided for two years between 2001-02. In 2011 she was inducted into the Academia Mexicana de la Historia; and in 2015 she received the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Historical Association. In 2016 the Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies established the Bandelier-Lavrin Prize for the best book published in colonial Latin American History.  Lavrin taught part-time in several institutions in the East Coast before making her career at Howard University. She was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, England. She transferred to Arizona State University in 1995, from where she retired Emerita after her husband's death in 2008. .