Emergence, Volume XI (2026) is now available! This volume features work from the 2025-2026 Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellows. You can read the whole thing here.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction by 2025-2026 Arnhold Graduate Fellow, Shaun Nowicki.

I wish to begin with three etymologies, or, thought another way, three stories of origin
and transformation.

One. It’s an often repeated fact that the essay, as a written form, comes to us first from the 16th-century French humanist Michel de Montaigne. First published in 1580, his Essais are quirky explorations of topics, often meandering from one idea to the next before returning us to a deeper, philosophical truth. “Of Names” proceeds in just this manner, starting with a seemingly unusual image, “No matter how varied the greenstuffs we put in, we include them all under the name of salad. So too here: while surveying names I am going to make up a mixed dish from a variety of items,” before moving through a series of anecdotal radishes and epigrammatic lettuce leaves covering ancient wisdom about the power of a name. (308) Montaigne is skeptical of this received wisdom—is Socrates truly who is is because he has a powerful name? Is there any actual, divinely-inspired force behind the name Henry that seems to make it such a desirable name for English and French monarchs? Montaigne arrives at a conclusion,

It is those who survive who are moved by the sweetness of those sounds stirred by a desire to rival those dead men, without reflection they mentally attribute their own emotions to them and deceive themselves into thinking that they too will be able to feel them in their turn. (313)

It’s a powerful indictment of the received wisdom we seek from those who come before, with Montaigne diagnosing the succor we wish to receive from the past as a fundamental human call that relies on self-deception. We might scorn the habit of relying on the past to define our present moment, if only we had courage. Of course, this is not the whole story, as Montaigne, in the very next sentence, quotes Juvenal’s “Satire X,” giving the last word not to invention but to reception. Montaigne’s essays are all idiosyncratic, like this, and offer a space for us to try out our ideas—to test their veracity against our own experience. These are its two original meanings in the French; essais: attempts, or tests.

Two. Another idea that obsessed Montaigne was “experience,” from the Latin word experientia. This word, rendered in another form, gives us the modern scientific term experiment—yet another form of testing the universe to seek out knowledge. Experience is understood more concretely, more practically; we are said to have experience through the lives we live and through the things that we do. One can gain experience only through trial and activity. When one is experienced, one is thought of as having an intuitive knowledge about the world, or about a specific subject matter. Where then does experience come from? Peeling back the word gives us more clues; at the center of experience is the verb peritus and its neighbor noun periculum. Periculum can mean a trial or an attempt, but it can also mean a risk, a hazard, or a danger. There is a sense, then, that if one is to become experienced, there must be some risk of failure, some danger that comes with facing the world and seeking out its secrets.

Three. The final word I am interested in is the noun project. In the highlycorporatized world, this is a familiar friend. We are always working on projects—developing ideas collaboratively or individually that will, with any luck, be manifested into a product or a new development in the world around us. Again, we find this word’s origin in Latin, where we can break it down again: pro (forth) + iectus (to throw). Projects are that which we cast forth, ideas which we scatter to the winds like seeds with the hope that they will bloom wherever they land. The term is inherently futureforward, demanding that we cast something of ourselves forward in a hopeful manner, potentially risking that we cast it all away for nothing (another potential meaning of proiectus).

The following pages contain thirteen brilliant pieces of writing which embody, in different ways, the three words I have just glossed. Written as part of the 2025- 2026 Arnhold Undergraduate Program, these critical essays and imaginative creative works each embody the spirit of risk-taking, experimentation, and inquiry that forms the backbone of humanistic study. Some writers try out new or underexplored critical territory—pushing new frontiers with underexplored or novel poetic archives, expanding theoretical frameworks and applying them to different texts, or creating new, exciting worlds that reflect our own inequitable and painful reality. Others re-examine older texts and older paradigms, bringing fresh insights through their own, individual perspectives. Each embodies the spirit of Montaigne’s Essais, attempting to articulate their own, original ideas while incorporating the best of past and present scholarship.

For more, see the full volume.