Celebrating 100 Years of Hispania: Overview and Response

Introduction

The people involved in the organization of the Modern Language Association session in New York City on January 6, 2018 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Hispania have various roles in the creation, development, and production of the centenary issue on Visionary Essays: The Future of Spanish and Portuguese (Hispania 2017) and its commemoration. Sheri Spaine Long (2017), Domnita Dumitrescu (2017), Benjamin Fraser (2017), and Frank Nuessel (2017) contributed essays for the historic special issue of Hispania. Domnita Dumitrescu is also the Review Editor of the journal; Jennifer Brady serves as Managing Editor and her contributions are found everywhere in the journal. Likewise, Luis Álvarez-Castro is an editorial board Associate Editor. Shannon M. Polchow (University of South Carolina Upstate) organized and arranged the MLA session. Furthermore, previous Editor-in-Chief of Hispania and now Executive Director of the AATSP, Sheri Spaine Long, and the current Editor-in-Chief of Hispania, Benjamin Fraser, contributed commentary in this session.

Since its modest but enthusiastic beginnings at the first annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish (Portuguese would be added to Association's name in 1944; Klein: 1044-45) on December 29, 1917 (Program), the AATSP has always sought to ensure high quality in all of its endeavors and to make its flagship journal Hispania the best academic journal of its kind both nationally and internationally. To be sure, it has achieved both goals through its various professional endeavors and through the diligent work of previous editors, and, most especially, under the guidance and leadership of the most recent Editor-in-Chief, Sheri Spaine Long (now Executive Director of the AATSP). Moreover, that tradition will continue under the outstanding leadership of our newly appointed Editor-in-Chief, Benjamin Fraser.

Throughout its century-long existence, Hispania has mirrored current trends in language, culture, and teaching. Moreover, it has foreshadowed emerging developments in these fields. It has encompassed three temporal dimensions, namely: the past, through recognition of previous research; the present, with a view of what is happening at a given moment in time; and the future, through the inclusion of promising innovative academic trends and developments in cultural, linguistic, and pedagogical research (Long).

MLA Session Speakers

All four speakers in this session have paid attention to the past, present, and future of Hispania. On the one hand, Jennifer Brady (2018, University of Minnesota Duluth) pays homage to the journal's historical twentieth-century roots while addressing the post-twentieth-century trend toward interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity with concrete examples of essays published in our journal. This includes what she labels as "boundary-pushing" research that "combine[s] pedagogy, cultural products (like literature or film), and another topic or field; and some rely on the relatively new Digital Humanities." Brady points out that these new approaches will require new ways of editing our journal (e.g., a broader more interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary group of associate editors). She also delineates the need to develop what Sheri Spaine Long calls the "pedagogy of editing" and emphasizes benefits of multiple authorship and closer ties with people outside our immediate disciplinary sphere by breaking down the walls that separate us in our quest to capture underlying and pre-existing relationships of cognate (inter)disciplines. As a reflection of its continuing commitment to interdisciplinarity and innovation, ACTFL's (2018) World Readiness Standards for Learning Languages with its 5Cs (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, Communities) now permeate the essays published in Hispania.

Book/Media Review Editor, Domnita Dumitrescu (2018, Professor Emerita, California State University, Los Angeles) likewise reflects on the century-long tradition of reviewing significant publications in our fields. In many ways, she has revolutionized this longstanding component of our journal with the following innovations: (1) introduction of new categories of books reviewed (Pan-Hispanic/Luso-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Studies, Linguistic, Language and Media, Fiction and Film); (2) peer review of book reviews; and (3) expansion of the items covered (film, fiction, web sites). Professor Dumitrescu's ability to seek out new and relevant publications worldwide and to select appropriate reviewers is remarkable. It is worth noting the statistics on the number of...