New General Editor for Modern Language Review
The Modern Language Review has been an iconic presence in the field since October 1905, and has been the MHRA's flagship journal ever since we assumed its editing in volume 17 (1922). It spans all the major European languages (including English), publishing 5496 articles and reviewing 25,427 books — both numbers, of course, ticking upwards like clockwork. Almost every notable European cultural figure of the last two millennia turns up somewhere in its pages.
Editing such a great sweep of academic activity is a major enterprise. The journal is organised by a team of eight scholarly editors, each looking after one language area. The General Editor, who customarily also takes the General and Comparative desk, has overall charge and works closely with MLR's indispensable production editor John Waś to sign off each issue. The quarterly appearance of MLR has been part of the rhythm of MHRA life for over a century now, and the overlapping teams of editors form an unbroken succession.
And this is succession time once again, with Lucy O’Meara passing the baton to Duncan Wheeler, previously the section editor for Hispanic languages. Duncan writes:
It is a huge privilege to take on the general editorship of Modern Language Review, one of the oldest journals in the field. I still have fond memories of reading articles from the journal in the Taylorian during my undergraduate degree and, once I embarked on my doctorate, it was an ambition of mine to publish in the journal. Since 2014, I have been the Hispanic Studies Editor, and it is an honour to now become General Editor working alongside an exemplary team of editors.
Lucy’s significant contributions as General Editor included the creation of the MLR best article prize, which we plan to continue, and many hours of work on what became this year's Fourth Edition of the MHRA Style Guide. The Guide evolved out of the journal's style conventions in the early 1970s, and is widely used in all manner of publications today.
For a fuller account of the early history of the journal, see Malcolm Cook's introduction to the centenary supplement One Hundred Years of MLR.
full news feed • subscribe via RSS