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  • Celebrating 100 Years of Hispania
  • Shannon M. Polchow

As an allied organization, the AATSP is guaranteed one session at the annual MLA convention. The 2018 meeting was held in New York City between January 4th and 7th. In spite of a blizzard, which halted air travel into the metropolitan area on January 4th and grounded conference attendees at airports across the United States, the AATSP was able to host a successful session entitled "Celebrating 100 Years of Hispania."

The rationale behind the panel was to honor this truly momentous milestone in the journal's history. Nowadays the negativity surrounding the humanities in general, and language studies in particular, is palpable. Newly-penned defenses of the humanities circulate around social media almost daily, and alongside those articles, world language professionals advocate for the discipline, detailing myriad benefits of studying a second language. Such continual justification, coupled with an ever-changing publishing industry, puts the feat into perspective. Despite today's challenges, Hispania does not merely subsist, it thrives, and the publication of the centenary issue is evidence of this accomplishment.

With its quasi-celebrity status, Hispania has been on the conference circuit, and the MLA is just one of the many conference stops for world language enthusiasts to participate in the jubilation. Thanks to Sheri Spaine Long, the centenary issue took center stage at the AATSP's July 2017 conference in Chicago and appeared at a special gathering in April 2018 at Harvard University's Instituto Cervantes, hosted by Francisco Moreno-Fernández. Furthermore, Luis Álvarez-Castro reconvened the aforementioned MLA panel across the Atlantic at the AATSP's June 2018 conference in Salamanca, Spain, whilst celebrating the journal's 101st birthday. While the panelists and topics at each event varied, each discussion exuded triumph. At the MLA conference, distinguished scholars, each with extensive ties to the journal and the world of academic publishing, reminisced about the past, examined the present, and speculated about the future of Hispania.

Jennifer Brady led off the panel. When she is not fulfilling her duties as the Managing Editor of Hispania, she is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her research focuses on repetition, neurosis, gender, and illness as related to identity and agency in contemporary filmic and literary works from Spain. She has coedited two recent anthologies, titled Shifting Subjectivities in Contemporary Fiction and Film from Spain (2018) and Collapse, Catastrophe, and Rediscovery: Spain's Cultural Panorama in the Twenty-First Century (2014). She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary Spanish authors José Javier Abasolo, Juan José Millás, and Rosa Montero, as well as Catalan and Spanish cinema.

Brady's contribution, "Once Again 'On the Threshold': Innovative Scholarship in Hispania in the Twenty-First Century Invests in Pedagogy and Partnerships," reflected upon the journal's past while highlighting the originality of the journal today. Hispania has been a repository for innovative scholarship and student-driven trends in curriculum development since 1917, and one measure of this innovation, one that puts the journal on the threshold, is its interdisciplinary nature. Brady traced the interdisciplinarity of the journal, specifically since 2000, and showed how it shapes today's Hispania. [End Page 487]

The second panelist was Domnita Dumitrescu, past Associate Editor of Hispania between 1996 and 2001 and current Book/Media Review Editor since 2011. Her list of accomplishments is impressive, most notably among them: achieving the rank of Professor Emerita of Spanish Linguistics at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), being recognized as the 2008 CSULA President's Distinguished Professor, and becoming a Full Member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, a Corresponding Member of the Spanish Royal Academy, and an Honorary President of Sigma Delta Pi.

In "Las reseñas de Hispania, al correr del tiempo: Siempre al tanto de las últimas novedades académicas," Dumitrescu took the audience from the past and into the present to show how the initial intent of the book review section has not changed much over the past one hundred years. The original purpose of the section was to provide a review of books on a wide variety of current topics published in the...

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