The Spanish and Portuguese Curriculum: Transition, Expansion, and (R)evolution

Hispania Editor-in-Chief Sheri Spaine Long (2010–18) ably continues the tradition of excellence and quality established by a small but distinguished group of former editors of Hispania during the first century of the journal's existence: Aurelio M. Espinosa (1918–26), Alfred Coester (1927–41), Henry Grattan Doyle (1942–48), Donald D. Walsh (1949–56), Robert G. Mead (1957–62), Seymour Menton 1958–65), Irving P. Rothberg (1966–74), Donald W. Bleznick (1975–83), Theodore A. Sackett (1984–92), Estelle Irizarry (1993–2000), and Janet Pérez (2001–09).

Sheri Spaine Long and I began work on the centenary issue of Hispania in July of 2014. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with her as a Guest Editor during the development of this special issue, which is, in reality, an extra, or fifth issue, of AATSP's outstanding quarterly journal. The contents will serve as a record that provides future members of our organization with a clear picture of the state of Hispanic studies and Luso-Brazilian studies 100 years after the founding of our organization. Moreover, the combination of essays and responses provides an educated forecast of future developments in a wide variety of subfields in Spanish and Portuguese. Each essay offers a succinct overview of the extant research in a particular area as well as a clear notion of what researchers are doing now. The focus of this volume, however, is on the visionary aspect of where we are headed as a profession.

We cast the widest possible net to seek contributions to this volume, namely, established academics, teachers, researchers, practitioners, and administrators of all levels and types of instruction. The intent was to produce a special issue of Hispania that reflected the diverse nature of our membership that includes more than 10,000 professionals and allied organizations.

The first official "Call for Abstracts" for the Centenary Issue of Hispania appeared online in September 2014 with a submission deadline of January 15, 2015. The instructions to potential contributors stated that:

The special issue is intended to provide readers of the journal with overview essays that contain both a succinct historical perspective and a forward-thinking vision of the future of a particular segment of our field. Most of the issue will address matters that will be of importance as Hispania enters its second century of publication. To that end, consistent with Hispania's broad scope, we are soliciting papers in a wide variety of areas identified in this separate call for abstracts. Abstracts can be written in English, Portuguese, or Spanish.

By the January 2015 deadline, we received a total of 133 abstracts. Sheri Spaine Long and I then proceeded to evaluate separately the quality and the appropriateness of the abstracts for inclusion in the centenary volume. We ultimately selected 31 abstracts for development into articles of 3,500 words. Subsequently, these essays underwent evaluation by a minimum of two anonymous reviewers. We then sent the completed essays to one or two scholar-teachers to prepare a response. We defined responses in the following way "An academic response involves the preparation of a careful and reasonable response to an original draft essay in which the author provides an alternate and collegial viewpoint on the topic." The responses were also subject to evaluation by at least two anonymous evaluators. There are 43 responses that provide differing perspectives on the original essay.

The articles and the responses in this special issue of Hispania represent the work of active and productive scholars and practitioners in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies. Their well-informed projections of what our endeavors will look like present a guardedly optimistic vision of the future. To be sure, there will be new challenges and unforeseen concerns for new generations of scholars and teachers. Nevertheless, the current cohort of students, instructors and scholars reinforces our belief that they will address opportunity and adversity with exceptional resourcefulness, dedication, and professionalism.

In very general terms, the essays and responses address certain overarching themes that link the topics of these essays and their responses, which we address briefly below. They...