From 1923 to 2023: 100 Years of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

This year the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies reaches 100 years of the journal’s existence. To mark this centenary year, general editors Claire Taylor (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies) and Diana Cullell (Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies) take us back to 1923 and through the Bulletin’s illustrious history as the first journal in Hispanism published in the UK.

To celebrate this milestone birthday a selection of articles from the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (BHS) archive and the first issue of Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies (BCHS) will be available free to read for a limited time.

Reflecting on 100 years of
Hispanic Studies

The year 2023 is a momentous one for the BHS, marking as it does the 100-year anniversary of its existence. Founded in 1923 by the then Gilmour Chair of Spanish, Professor Edgar Allison Peers, and appearing originally under the title Bulletin of Spanish Studies, the BHS was the first journal in Hispanism published in the UK. In 1949 it was renamed Bulletin of Hispanic Studies to reflect its wider remit, and has grown since then, now publishing ten issues per year.

The founder of the journal, Edgar Allison Peers, was one of the most influential figures in UK Hispanism in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Allison Peers was the second holder of the Gilmour Chair in Spanish at the University of Liverpool, a post to which he was appointed in 1922. The following year saw the publication of the first issue of the BHS, with a Foreword by the Spanish Ambassador, Alfonso Merry del Val, highlighting the positive values of the Spanish language as the ‘golden key’ to the literatures and cultures of the Hispanic world, followed by a range of contributions including scholarly articles, book reviews and reports.

Since its founding by Allison Peers, the BHS has gone from strength to strength over the years, and a foray into its archives provides a fascinating glimpse of how Hispanism as a discipline has grown and taken shape in the UK from the first half of the twentieth century to the present day. Some of the early volumes in the 1930s, for instance, capture responses to the Spanish Civil War, including special sections that the journal ran in the 1930s, such as ‘A Diary of the Civil War’ and ‘Documents of the Civil War’, which followed the Spanish Civil War as it happened.

We can also chart the development of the remit of the journal and the field of Hispanic Studies as a discipline. Notable, for instance, is the rise in number of articles over time in areas such as film studies, visual culture, gender studies and, more recently, decolonial approaches.

With the support of its publisher, Liverpool University Press, the BHS continues to grow, and recently celebrated the founding of the new ‘sister’ journal, the Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies (BCHS), in 2018. The new journal was launched, aptly, at the Annual Allison Peers Symposium that year, with contributions that approached the latest cutting-edge research within the discipline of Iberian and Latin American Studies, with a special emphasis on sports, politics and culture, and the well-established Allison Peers Annual Lecture delivered by Pep Guardiola, professional football manager and former football player.

The BCHS builds on the long-standing success of the BHS, and it has published two issues per year since its launch. The BCHS focuses on contemporary scholarship across all areas of the Hispanic world, but the journal’s interests are broad-ranging in terms of geography, genre and focus, publishing articles in the areas of contemporary literature, linguistics, cultural history, film and the visual arts, cultural and Gender Studies, and other aspects of contemporary Hispanic Studies.

CLAIRE TAYLOR
General Editor, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies
DIANA CULLELL
General Editor, Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies.

“The Press has been fortunate to work with some outstanding scholars across its long history. The present holder of Allison Peers’ Gilmour Chair of Spanish and General Editor of the BHS, Professor Claire Taylor, alongside her editorial
colleagues in the University of Liverpool’s Department of Languages, Cultures and Film, is helping to shape the future of Hispanic Studies even as she celebrates the BHS’s first hundred years”.
Anthony Cond Chief Executive Officer Liverpool University Press.

Centenary panel at the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) – 68th Annual Conference

Taking place in Dublin from 17-21 April 2023, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, along with the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, is sponsoring a joint panel entitled ‘BHS and BSS ECA Centenary Panel – In Celebration of 100 “Bulletin” Years’. At this panel, these two very successful journals in Hispanism celebrate the centenary and also promote new future directions in Hispanic Studies research. Both journals have enjoyed outstanding success and feature prominently among the highest impact journals in Hispanic Studies. Both are going from strength to strength in terms of depth of published research and international reach. Both have recently developed sibling journals that are a testimony to innovation and to the sustainability of the research base in Great Britain and Ireland: the Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies and the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies. Both journals are deeply committed to fostering next generation thinkers.
This joint panel at the AHGBI constitutes a celebration that goes beyond marking the achievements of the journals and extends to recognising the vibrancy and future growth of research in Hispanic Studies in these islands. It showcases the commitment to support early career researchers shared by both journals and the AHGBI.
The panel consists of four ECA contributors, with Professor Claire Taylor and Professor Isabel Torres, General Editors of the BHS and BSS respectively, participating as respondents. The four ECA contributors are drawn from the best articles authored by ECAs and PGRs accepted or recently published (2020 to date) in the BHS and BSS.

The panel speakers are as follows:

Mary Farrelly, University College Dublin, ‘Saritísima: Sara Montiel, Stardom, and the Popular Sublime’.
Manus O’Dwyer, University of Oxford (Queen’s College). ‘Slow Violence and World Ecology in the Work of Rafael Chirbes and Ana Penyas’.
Maria Czepiel, University of Oxford (Brasenose and Balliol Colleges). ‘Lyric love in the work of Fray Luis de León’.
Rodrigo López Martínez, University of Aberdeen. ‘Psychoanalysis and Cinema in Argentina: From Cultural Modernization to Political Radicalization’.

The editors of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies very much look forward to this panel, and to the contributions of many more early career researchers to the journal.