At an Elements editorial meeting, from left: Rebecca Kraus ’07, Katherine Wu ’07, Susan Connolly ’07, Damien Croteau-Chonka ’07, Nathaniel Campbell ’07, and Mark O’Connor. Photograph: Joan Seidel

After spending the summer of 2003 studying budget deficits in Washington, D.C., economics major Greg Wiles ’06 wrote up an analysis of his work. He shared it with a few of his professors—the project had been supported by a BC undergraduate research fellowship—and then dropped it in the drawer of his desk. “It was so exciting to do the research, and so hard just to stow it away,” says Wiles, now with a New York investment banking firm.

The sophomore began talking with faculty about launching an undergraduate research journal at Boston College, and he found he was one of several students across the disciplines who had expressed similar interest. Faculty members too had discussed the idea over the years, and in September 2004 Mark O’Connor, director of the Arts and Sciences Honors Program, and political science professor Donald Hafner, director of the University Fellowships Committee, called a meeting of students interested in starting a scholarly journal. An invitation to formally pitch ideas yielded 12 proposals. Wiles was chosen editor-in-chief. Within months, he and a staff of 18 seniors, juniors, and sophomores put out a call for student submissions in every discipline, and in May 2005 Elements, the University’s undergraduate research journal, rolled off the press.

Owing to the creation, in the last 10 years, of faculty-student internships, Advanced Study Grants, and additional summer research fellowships, there had been a growing body of student work at Boston College “that very few people ever saw,” says Wiles. Concurrently, notes O’Connor, who serves as the advisor to Elements‘ staff , improvements in computers and the Internet have made it easier for students to follow “their own intellectual curiosity.” Now in its third year, the annu­al publication has a staff of 30 students.

The first two issues—soft-cover books of 90-plus pages on thick matte stock with full-color covers—disappeared quickly from the dining halls and libraries where they were distributed, says English major Rebecca Kraus ’07, the current editor-in-chief. A staff member from the start, Kraus spent the last two years as managing editor, helping Wiles to shape the publication. “We wanted it to look professional without looking stuffy,” she says of the journal’s clean modern design. The May 2005 inaugural issue featured on its cover a portrait by Edouard Manet of the enigmatic French poet Stephane Mallarmé (1842–98), subject of an article by Kaelin Grant ’07, a philosophy and French double major. (Grant’s article attempted to parse the poet’s famously impenetrable writings, following leads from modern critics and clues from Mallarmé’s life.) For the second issue, published last March, the staff chose a cover shot of the medieval Blue Koran, with its rich dyed parchment and gold lettering. The Blue Koran was one of the most exquisite and disputed Islamic manuscripts of its time, according to art history major Emily Neumeier ’08, whose article explored conflicting theories of the manuscript’s provenance.

Elements joins a long tradition of undergraduate scholarly journals at U.S. universities, including the Harvard Political Review, the MIT Undergraduate Research Journal, and Brown’s Journal of World Affairs. But it is hardly the first BC publication to do so. The 1940s through the 1960s saw the flourishing of several student math and science publications at BC, including Cosmos, a science biannual that appeared from 1959 to 1970, and Scope, a biology quarterly from 1951 to 1959. To Logeion, originally offered as a quarterly on the classics, appeared twice in the spring of 1940 before recasting itself as The Humanities the following fall. By the winter of 1963, it had become Humanities Magazine, a black-and-white, all-text effort devoted to literature, the arts, and the social sciences, published through 1971.

From conception, Elements‘ main purpose has been to showcase the diversity of research at the University in a manner that might appeal to a wide readership. “Only a handful of other undergraduate journals were doing that,” says Wiles. He, Kraus, and the rest of the journal’s early staff recruited student editors from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Every submission is evaluated by editors within its phylum, and then read again by at least two staff members outside the field to gauge its general appeal. According to Kraus, “It doesn’t matter how good the research is if no one wants to read it.”

Among the 18 articles published in the first two issues, “there was something for everyone,” says classics and German major Nathaniel Campbell ’07, an Elements staff member since the first year. (Campbell’s article “De Malorum Natura: Lucretius and the Nature of Evil” appeared in Spring 2006.) Topics have spanned from the world of Don Quixote to Euro pricing in the oil markets, and from malaria prevention to the effects of television’s gay stereotypes on consumers. In the second issue, “Antioxidants and Gene Regulation,” by biology major Jeong Ho Nam ’08, illustrated with black-and-white photos of DNA bands, shared space with “The Pornography Wars: Exploring Two Distinct Feminist Identities,” by Meredith Hudson ’06, a political science and sociology major.

“Hudson’s article has become one of the measures of our success,” says Kraus. Recently, an author from the educational publishing house Allyn and Bacon contacted Elements asking to reprint “The Pornography Wars” in an upcoming edition of the textbook Human Sexuality. “The author came across the paper,” said Kraus, “when she read Elements online.”

This February, inspired by the success of Elements and the surge of undergraduate interest in research, Hafner and the University Fellowships Committee organized an Undergraduate Research Symposium, the first in what is expected to be an annual series. More than 40 students were invited to present their work to the BC community on the afternoon of February 2 in rooms throughout Gasson Hall.

The newest issue of Elements will feature a cover story on Mexican migration by economics and Hispanic studies major Matthew Hamilton ’09. “In the last decade, Boston College has seen the quality and quantity of undergraduate research improve exponentially,” says O’Connor. Elements “was a terrific idea waiting to happen.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg