Staff
Pablo Piccato
Director
Professor Piccato received his B.A. from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1989 and 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), Congreso y Revolución: El parlamentarismo en la XXVI Legislatura (Cámara de Diputados, 1991), the edition of El Poder Legislativo en las décadas revolucionarias (Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1997), and, with Cristina Sacristán, of Actores, espacios y debates en la historia de la esfera pública en la ciudad de México (Instituto Mora, 2005). Forthcoming books include the edition, with Robert Buffington, of Mexican Crime Stories: Case Studies, Causes Célèbres, and Other True-to-Life Adventures in the Social Construction of Deviance (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.
Since coming to Columbia, Professor Piccato has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, member of the University Senate and of the executive committees of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese as well as ILAS. He has been a fellow and is member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. In Mexico he has taught courses at universities in Mexico City, Morelia, Xalapa, and Culiacán. He was a member of the editorial board of Signos Históricos and is member of the boards of Law and History Review and the Hispanic American Historical Review.
Maritza E. Colón
Executive Director
Maritza Colón received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from New York University, both with specializations in Latin American history. Most recently, she was the Department Administrator at the Department of History at Columbia University and also held the same position at the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. From 2000-2008 she was the Assistant Director at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU. In that capacity she played an important role in developing their Quechua language program, establishing collaborations with foundations, and partnering with Columbia in our successful joint application for a Title VI grant.
Seth Fein
Director of Graduate Studies
Professor Fein's work focuses on the crossborder Americas and audiovisual culture. He was a professor of history at Yale (2002-2010) where he taught graduate and undergraduate course on the international and transnational histories of the Americas. He currently teaches in Columbia's departments of Latin American & Caribbean Studies and History. His book, Transnational Projections: The United States in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, will be published by Duke.
He is now completing the research and writing of a collection of essays, The Idea of the Western Hemisphere, which includes studies of the Pan American Highway and of U.S. foreign policy's use of Latin American television in the 1960s, which is also the subject of a documentary -- Our Neighborhood -- that he is now directing. Fein has commented on Washington's post-9/11 use of TV in the Middle East and consulted on historical documentaries about moving images; he appears in the BBC’s The Thirties in Colour (2008). He is also currently co-making (with Sophie Ziner) a documentary about the boundary-defying socioculture of radio-control car, plane, and helicopter enthusiasts who drive and fly in Flushing, Queens. Fein did his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. Read more
Thomas J. Trebat
Director of The Brazil Center
Professor Tom Trebat is the Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at ILAS. He joins Columbia after a lengthy career on Wall Street dedicated to economic research on Latin America. Prior to joining ILAS in February 2005, Tom was Managing Director and Head of the Latin America team in the Economic and Market Analysis department of Citigroup. He joined Citicorp Securities in 1996 as the head of Emerging Market Research. Previously, he worked at Bankers Trust, the Ford Foundation, and Chemical Bank. As a senior international economist at Bankers Trust, he was involved in many aspects of country debt negotiations in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America during the 1980s. At the Ford Foundation, he served for four years as the Regional Director for Latin America and Caribbean Programs. At Chemical Bank, Tom organized and directed the emerging markets research group. Mr. Trebat has a Ph.D in economics from Vanderbilt University and remains active in teaching and publishing. He is also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. His book, “Brazil's State-owned Enterprises: A Case Study of the State as Entrepreneur,” was published by Cambridge University Press in 1983.
Eliza Kwon-Ahn
Student Affairs Coordinator
Eliza graduated in 1997 with BA in East Asian Languages & Area Studies, Spanish, and Portuguese from Rutgers University. As a Henry Rutgers Scholar, she conducted a graduate level research on "Koreans in Brazil: A Cultural Study of Life Between Two Cultures." She also received her MA in Latin American & Caribbean Studies and an Advanced Certificate in Museum Studies from New York University in 2001. Prior to joining ILAS in June 2003, she worked for different organizations, including as a Latin American Sales & Marketing Manager for a multinational company and as Project Research Assistant for "Brazil: Body and Soul" Exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Her interest in Latin America is mainly in Brazil, Arts & Cultures, Immigration & Cultural Assimilation, National Identity, and Social and Education Development.
Esteban Andrade
Program Manager
Esteban received his BA in Political Science with concentration in Latin American Studies from Manhattanville College. As a Graduate Division of Arts & Sciences Fellowship Recipient, he received his MA in Spanish Literature from St. John’s University, where he worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Committee for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). Prior to joining ILAS, Esteban worked as the Regional Program Coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), where he helped create new partnerships with various academic and research institutions in Latin America, as well as developing project proposals for institutions such as the National Science Foundation, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank.
Ruth E. Borgman
Language Coordinator
Prof. Borgman received her M.A. from the University of Puerto Rico and her PhD in Latin American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. As a full-time lecturer in the Spanish Department, she specializes in developing pedagogically innovative content-based Spanish courses, especially Mexican and Pre-Hispanic Studies.
Currently she has developed and taught a writing course for Spanish majors on “Contemporary Mexico: Myths and Realities.” In the summer of 2008 she received an ILAS travel grant to research the Camino Real colonial route from Zacatecas, Mexico to Santa Fe, New Mexico as part of her new course “Four Migrations” between Mexico and United States, from Pre-Hispanic years to the current immigration crisis.
Sean Knowlton
Research Librarian
As the Latin American and Iberian Studies Librarian at Columbia University, Sean selects research materials in all subject areas from or about the Caribbean, Latin America, Spain, and Portugal. He provides personalized research assistance to both students and faculty and collaborates with faculty on library instruction sessions for their courses. Sean received an MA in Hispanic Literature and an MS in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His MA thesis, entitled "Alvar Fáñez in four medieval texts: transformations of an epic hero," explores the literary incarnations of this historical figure associated with Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar. Sean's current interests include Brazil, Cuba, digital resources, and research services.
