Hooray for associate professor of history Pablo Piccato, who has just been named as the new Director of SIPA’s Institute of Latin American Studies, a position which he’ll occupy until 2011.

Piccato is a scholar of Mexican history and has taught at the University since 1997. According to the email announcement, he’s previously “served as director of undergraduate studies in the history department, associate director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, member of the University Senate, and an executive committee member in the departments of Spanish and Portuguese.”

He’s also been described by a Bwog colleague as “adorable.”

Full email after the jump. 

NEW YORK, October 13, 2008 — Columbia University has announced the appointment of Pablo Piccato, associate professor of history, to lead the Institute on Latin American Studies at the School of International and Public Affairs. Piccato is a distinguished historian of Mexico with a focus on the modern intersection of crime, politics and culture. He will lead the center through July 2011.

“Professor Piccato has played an active role at the institute since joining Columbia’s history department in 1997,” said John Coatsworth, dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. “His intellectual stewardship will be important in reestablishing the institute’s reputation as a leading center for the study of Latin America in the United States, and his administrative leadership will be crucial for implementing our new master’s degree program in Latin American and Caribbean studies.”

Piccato has served as director of undergraduate studies in the history department, associate director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, member of the University Senate, and an executive committee member in the departments of Spanish and Portuguese. He is an advisory board member at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He has taught at Morelia, Xalapa, and Culiacán Universities in Mexico City. He was a member of the editorial board of Signos Históricos and is a member of the editorial boards of Law and History Review and Hispanic American Historical Review.

“Columbia already has one of the strongest and most diverse groups of experts on Latin America in the United States,” said Pablo Piccato. “I hope to be able to serve the development of their research agendas and make the institute a shared space for the discussion and teaching of Latin America. Columbia is the ideal place to achieve this: our student body is increasingly interested in the region and New York itself is, in many ways, a Latin American city.”

Piccato graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1989 and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997. His published work includes City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931 (Duke University Press, 2001) and Congreso y Revolución: El parlamentarismo en la XXVI Legislatura (Cámara de Diputados, 1991).

Forthcoming books include Mexican Crime Stories: Case Studies, Causes Célèbres, and Other True-to-Life Adventures in the Social Construction of Deviance, with Robert Buffington (University of New Mexico Press), and The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere (Duke University Press). He is currently working on a political biography of poet Salvador Díaz Mirón and on a history of Mexican civil society’s responses to crime from the 1920s to the present.