Welcome to the inaugural issue of Proto, an annual, humanities-centered journal that will disseminate undergraduate scholarship from institutions in the mid-Atlantic region. The journal's title expresses its ethos. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the prefix proto- connotes something that is the "earliest, original; at an early stage of development, primitive; incipient, potential." At its best, undergraduate scholarship embodies all of these qualities. While it almost certainly constitutes scholarship at an early stage of development, it also has the potential to be original and...