This edition of Emergence features creative and critical projects by the 2023-2024 cohort of Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellows in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of English. The Arnhold program allows English majors to explore their intellectual interests beyond the structure of grade-based coursework, while developing a research and writing practice that will serve them in the years to come.

“Emergence” is a process-noun, but one that can obscure the fits and starts, the iteration and re-organizing, the abandonment and revival of certain trains of thought – in brief, the -ing of writing. It can also conceal  the role of chance and serendipity in writing projects: finding the right source  at the perfect time; losing weeks of planned writing to emergencies; and, in the case of this journal and our postering session in May, discovering the converging themes and ideas across independently-devised projects. This issue, titled “Flow into Form” to give some specificity to the process of emergence, has been organized to reveal thematic connections between works that are often formally very different: each work speaks to something in the next, whether through method, research subject, or tone.

Several of these works also experiment with form and flow, with fellows developing their own voices both literally (through first-person reflection) and figuratively (through strong stylistic choices on paragraph length and structure).  Such formal experimentation predated their work for Emergence, as these and several other Arnhold scholars presented their research via posters in the Spring. I have documented a few projects that were only showcased at this postering session at the end of this issue, to honor the immense amount of creativity that they, too, contributed to this year’s Arnhold cohort.

– Leila Stegemoeller, 2024 Arnhold Graduate Fellow