In One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song, Fordham history professor Asif Siddiqi, Ph.D., and 15 other writers attempt to answer those questions. They each delve into the history of a song from the past 60-plus years, and their essays, Siddiqi writes, “show the undiminished power of the pop song.” He sees them as “distillations of important flashpoints,” and he hears in them “ghostly echoes that persist undiminished but transform[ed] for succeeding generations.”

The idea for the book blossomed at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in June 2019. That’s when the University’s O’Connell Initiative on the Global History of Capitalism provided funding for a workshop where Siddiqi and other contributors began to flesh out the cultural reflections they noticed in pop songs across the decades.

“We knew that there were a couple of running themes,” said Siddiqi, the book’s editor. “One was that technology was everywhere, not only in terms of recording studios [and instruments] but also media, like CDs and streaming, etc. And the other thing that was everywhere was, of course, capitalism, because of the business of making music.”

Siddiqi, a former Guggenheim Fellow, is best known for his books on the history of space exploration, including The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857–1957. But he is also a guitar player and music lover with a keen interest in the technology of music production.

He said he was wary of gravitating too far toward the kind of classic rock often seen as the canon by fans and critics, so he encouraged contributors to highlight a diversity of artists and sounds. Their selections run the gamut from Afropop to hip-hop and span nearly five decades, from “Indépendance Cha Cha,” the 1960 Congolese anthem by Le Grand Kallé and African Jazz, to M.I.A.’s 2007 hit, “Paper Planes.”

Along with Siddiqi, four other Fordham professors or graduates wrote essays for the book, which was published last fall as part of Routledge’s Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.

“Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin

Esther Liberman Cuenca, Ph.D., GSAS ’19, a medieval historian, wrote about Led Zeppelin’s obsession with medievalism, evident in the J.R.R. Tolkien references and Viking allusions in their lyrics—the latter most prominent in 1970’s “Immigrant Song.” With its hard-charging riff and wordless, wailing chorus, the song “made an ideal conduit through which ideas about the medieval world of the Vikings were communicated in popular culture,” Liberman Cuenca writes.

Inspired by a triumphant stop the band made in Iceland on their way to the Bath Festival in England, the swaggering machismo of the track was in part simple braggadocio about their “conquest” of foreign music markets, but Liberman Cuenca notes that there may have been a bit of British tongue-in-cheek humor in the band’s nod to colonization.

“Led Zeppelin’s particular brand of medievalism,” she writes, “banked on a type of nostalgia for an idyllic, rural Britain reflecting the postwar, post-industrial anxieties that many British youth in the 1960s and 1970s experienced. … For the British, the failed [Viking] colony of Vinland represented their fears of how carefully calibrated imperial projects could fail.”

“Rebel Rebel” by David Bowie

The capitalist spirit of the music industry—and its focus on reaching foreign markets—is on full display in Fordham English professor Glenn Hendler’s essay on David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” from 1974.

While the best-known version of the song, from the album Diamond Dogs, is a fairly straightforward rock song, Bowie decided he wanted to incorporate the sounds of Latin music for the U.S. single. In the mid-1970s, though, with album-oriented rock—and its mostly white purveyors—dominating FM radio playlists, the prominence of castanets and congas in the U.S. single meant that it was relegated to the AM dial, where listeners would find almost all non-rock (and non-white) sounds. And while that version still managed to crack the Billboard Hot 100 chart, it was replaced by the U.K. version after several months.

“The marketing did not match the product,” Hendler writes, “at least not in a context in which rock was being starkly differentiated from soul music, R&B, dance music, and Latin music. The U.S. single of ‘Rebel Rebel’ largely fell between the cracks of race, culture, format, and genre. The shape of those cracks would define the U.S. music market for years to come.”

“Mmmbop” by Hanson

In 1997, two decades after David Bowie released two versions of “Rebel, Rebel,” a different kind of marketing decision—opening direct lines of communication to fans via fast-growing online spaces—helped the brothers in Hanson turn their hit song “Mmmbop” into a springboard for building a devoted following, which is explored in an essay by Louie Dean Valencia, Ph.D., GSAS ’16.

Through the band’s official website and other online forums, Hanson’s fan engagement allowed the group to survive, Valencia writes. “The boy band singing about the ephemerality of relationships used digital technology to maintain their relationships with their fans—attempting to adapt to the digital era in real time.”

“Candle in the Wind 1997” by Elton John

Elton John released “Candle in the Wind 1997,” a tribute to the late Princess Diana, in September 1997, two weeks after her death. It’s an update to the 1974 version written in honor of Marilyn Monroe. In One-Track Mind,
Christine Caccipuoti, FCLC ’06, GSAS ’08, describes how the song—a massive hit and cultural phenomenon that John has protected from widespread commercial usage—tapped into the same shifting modes of consumption as Hanson’s hit “Mmmbop” did that year.

“As the still-nascent internet became a site for growing personal expression in the late 1990s,” Caccipuoti writes, “many chose to create memorial websites. … These mostly female-run sites included many of the same features: photographs of Diana, writing about the host’s personal grief, and the lyrics to ‘Candle in the Wind 1997.’”

“Paper Planes” by M.I.A.

In the book’s last chapter, Siddiqi tackles technology on the music-creation side—specifically the practice of digital sampling, which has shaped the sound of pop music in the past 30-plus years. He writes about M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” a 2007 song by a Sri Lankan–British artist that samples the Clash’s 1982 song “Straight to Hell”—itself a critique of British and American colonialism—to explore the hustles necessary to survive in the colonialized Global South.

As a cheap technology, sampling has both democratized music creation and, at times, led to more unlicensed co-opting of “global” music by established European and American artists, Siddiqi notes. But its predominant use in hip-hop points to a certain reclaiming of history.

“As with writers and historians who liberally quote from prior works, by analogy, hip-hop artists using the digital sampler invoke, echo, and cite earlier artists through mechanical reproduction,” he writes. “The digital sampler here is not simply a musical instrument, a technical artifact, it also becomes, as M.I.A. shows in ‘Paper Planes,’ a tool for writing and rewriting history for those for whom history has always been written by others.”

As a whole, One-Track Mind offers plenty of opportunities to see the way that pop songs contribute to the writing and rewriting of history.

“Every song has a life cycle from birth to out into the world,” Siddiqi said. “And to write that biography is actually to talk about a moment in time. So I think you can read these stories if you are just interested in social and cultural history. Even if you don’t know the song, it might tell you something.”

“The U.S.-Mexico borderlands is a place where the Earth just swallows up bodies,” says Leo Guardado, Ph.D.

He doesn’t mince words about the humanitarian crisis at the border. In May, 144,278 migrants were taken into custody by the U.S. Border Patrol, the highest monthly total in more than a decade. And each year, the agency finds hundreds of corpses—the remains of men, women, and children who died traversing the vast desert and mountain regions on both sides of the dividing line.

The Trump administration’s efforts—separating migrant parents and children, deploying U.S. troops to the border, sending asylum-seekers to Mexico to await immigration court hearings—have not reduced the number of people fleeing poverty and violence in Central America to enter the U.S. without authorization.

Guardado knows all too well the pain and fear that families suffer when making the dangerous decision to migrate to the U.S. He was just 9 years old in 1991 when he and his mother made the nearly 3,000-mile trek from their mountain town in El Salvador.

Today, he is an assistant professor of theology at Fordham. And while the federal government remains deeply divided on how to handle the crisis, he views it not as a political abstraction but as a theological issue.

A Migrant’s Journey

Guardado was born in a rural town in northern El Salvador during the country’s civil war. As he approached his 10th birthday, his mother feared that he would soon be conscripted by the army or the guerrillas.

She was determined to move him from harm’s way. Family in the U.S. loaned them money, and Guardado said his grandfather probably sold what little cattle the family had to help pay for his and his mother’s journey. He remembers crying with his grandfather as they said their goodbyes, both of them knowing they might never see each other again. And they never did.

“We got on a bus, and I counted palm trees,” Guardado said. He learned two English phrases from his mother—“‘Thank you,’ ‘I’m sorry’—how to be grateful and how to ask for forgiveness,” he said. “These were the only two phrases that I had in my English vocabulary leaving El Salvador.”

He thinks he counted palm trees as a way of remembering his country. By the time he reached the hundreds, he fell asleep. He awoke in Guatemala, and from there his memory skips through a series of glimpses, mostly involving walking: “A lot. Many days. Under the moonlight.” He traveled with a group of about 15 migrants who followed a “coyote,” a paid guide, for the length of the journey.

He remembers being crammed into false compartments of trailers, packed together “like sardines” for five hours at a time. In Tijuana, they crossed beneath a barbed-wired fence patrolled by jeeps, and in darkness jammed into a small taxi like a “clown car,” which took them over back roads to a white van that ultimately brought them to San Diego.

He and his mother eventually connected with family in Los Angeles, where Guardado was educated by the De La Salle Christian Brothers at Cathedral High School. He earned a full scholarship to attend Saint Mary’s College of California, and it was in his first year there that he finally received legal residency status. He became a U.S. citizen in 2010.

Religion, Politics, and Sanctuary

Saint Mary’s is not far from a Trappist monastery, where Guardado spent a year before earning a master’s degree in theology at the University of Notre Dame. For two years, he directed the social justice ministry at a Catholic church in Tucson, Arizona. Then he returned to the monastery for what he thought would be the rest of his life. But there, in isolation, ideas began to “percolate,” he said, and he returned to Notre Dame, where he earned a doctorate in theology.

He initially studied early church history, but his focus changed after he took a course with Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the father of liberation theology, which emphasizes the perspective of the poor.

“I began to crack open the possibility that my own experience, my community’s experience, and the historical reality of Latin America—poverty, oppression, war, violence—that all of this was raw material out of which I could do theological reflection,” Guardado said.

In his dissertation, he wrote about the 1980s sanctuary movement, when hundreds of Catholic churches provided a safe haven for refugees from Central America. Today, he said, only a handful of churches in the U.S. are willing to take that risk. He said bishops will often say providing sanctuary is illegal or too political.

“The term sanctuary often mistakenly gets reduced to politics,” he said. “In light of human displacement worldwide and 11 million undocumented here in the U.S., if we’re to be a church of and for the poor, then you can’t just say ‘no.’ You have to engage with the question theologically. Otherwise, one can argue that it’s an ecclesial sin of omission.”

Guardado said the point of theology is not just to “do religious metaphysics” but to deal with contemporary issues head-on. He is developing a course on migration and theology that will include a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I want my students to ask: How does theological thinking change the world? How does it change history? How does it leave an impact so that it’s not just thinking about God but actually aims to transform the world?”

Bearing Witness at the Border

Guardado is far from being the only Fordham professor engaging with the humanitarian crisis at the border.

During spring break in March, a group of 10 faculty members went to see it for themselves. They visited the Kino Border Initiative, a consortium of six Catholic organizations in the border city of Nogales—both on the Arizona side and the Sonora, Mexico, side—that serves deportees and asylum-seekers and promotes a spirit of international solidarity.

Faculty members raised $13,000 to buy toiletries and necessities for the migrants, and Fordham’s Office of Mission Integration and Planning funded the trip. Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president for mission integration and planning, said it was a necessity, given how migration is now a major global challenge.

“Because this is such a major social issue and it impacts questions of justice, what we want to be as a society, and how a place like Fordham, as a Jesuit university, tries to develop students, we decided the border would be a great site for this immersion experience for a diverse group of faculty members,” he said.

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Communications and Media Studies, and theology professor James McCartin, Ph.D., acting associate provost of the University, co-led the trip.

It was the second time Reich went to Nogales, having worked with the Kino Initiative in January 2018. Although only 14 months had passed, the experience was very different, she said. As before, the group stayed overnight in Arizona and crossed the border to work in a comedor, or cafeteria, in Mexico, that provided meals to people waiting for asylum claims to be heard in the United States.

In 2018, she said, they would typically have one seating of 40 to 50 people—mostly men, a few women, and very few unaccompanied minors. This time, there were multiple seatings with 300 people per meal.

“We spent a lot of time holding babies while people could eat, or entertaining children, or sitting and talking to groups of families that had left Honduras, Guatemala, or regions of Mexico that were affected by gang violence and poverty,” she said.

In addition to serving meals, the group hosted a party at a women’s shelter, met with Border Patrol agents, and hiked along the border to understand the conditions there.

They also attended an “Operation Streamline” hearing in Tucson, Arizona, where immigrants appeared in a group before a judge, who often deported them for being in the U.S. illegally after asking two quick questions.

Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., a professor of English and American studies and acting chair of the English department, said he was surprised to learn that a wall was constructed through the middle of the city of Nogales in 1994, long before President Donald Trump made building a border wall his signature campaign promise.

Although he does not speak Spanish, he was able to connect with a 6-year-old girl at the comedor whose father was washing dishes nearby.

“It was an incredible joy to make a child who was going through a horrific experience laugh,” he said. “The next day, we were serving a meal, and I heard a little girl yelling ‘hola, hola,’ and it was the same little girl again. She was happy to see me, and I was happy to see her. But there were so many people there that they just got rushed out, so I never got to say goodbye to this little girl. For some reason, that just broke my heart.”

Speaking with the Border Patrol complicated the picture for Hendler because it showed how difficult the job is, he said. But it did not change his mind about the moral implications of the situation. In fact, he said that by then he felt more emotionally connected to what had previously been an abstract concept.

‘Accompany, Humanize, Complicate’

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, was moved by learning specific details of the migrants’ experience, like why black water bottles are a must for those crossing the border at night. (They don’t reflect moonlight.) “We were told to accompany, humanize, and complicate,” she said. “To see those real items that our guide had collected on hikes through the desert, and also to see people get out of a van who’d been deported and go into the soup kitchen we were working in [in Mexico], was something that really stood out.”

McCartin, the theology professor who co-led the trip, recalled a conversation with a man from Honduras who asked if all Americans consider him and his fellow migrants to be criminals. “I said, ‘Oh gosh, no, I have no problem with you.’ This guy was like, ‘Really? I can’t believe that.’ I said, ‘No, I can see how you have a sense that that’s how Americans talk about you, and there are plenty of them that do, but there are also a lot of us that don’t really begrudge you trying to have a better life,’” he said.

“This moment of his being surprised that we’re not unified in our attitudes toward people at the border—a lightbulb went on for this guy, and I’ll remember that.”

—Story co-author: Patrick Verel

This spring, a group of 10 Fordham faculty members traveled there to see it for themselves. From March 17 to 22, they visited the Kino Border Initiative, a consortium of six Catholic organizations in the border city of Nogales—both on the Arizona side and the Sonora, Mexico side. Kino aims to promote border and immigration policies that affirm the dignity of the human person and a spirit of binational solidarity.

The trip was funded by Fordham’s Office of Mission Integration and Planning and featured faculty from arts and sciences, the Graduate School of Social Service, the Graduate School of Education, the Gabelli School of Business, and the Law School. The group raised $13,000 to purchase toiletries and necessities for the migrants and documented their time on a blog.

Big Changes in Just One Year

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., professor of communications and chair of the Department of Communications and Media Studies, co-led the trip along with Associate Professor of Theology and Acting Associate Provost James McCartin, Ph.D. It was Reich’s second time in Nogales, having worked with Kino in January 2018. Although only 14 months had passed since her last visit, the experience was very different, she said. As before, the group stayed overnight in Arizona and crossed the border to work in a comedor, or cafeteria, in Mexico, that provided meals to people waiting for asylum claims to be heard in the United States.

In 2018, she said, they would typically have one seating of 40 to 50 people—mostly men, a few women, and very few unaccompanied minors. This time, there were multiple seatings with 300 people per meal.

“We spent a lot of time holding babies while people could eat, or entertaining children, or sitting and talking to groups of families that had left Honduras, Guatemala, or regions of Mexico that were affected by gang violence and poverty,” she said.

In addition to serving meals, the group hosted a party at a women’s shelter, met with border patrol agents, and hiked along the border to understand the conditions there. They also attended an “Operation Streamline” hearing in Tuscon, Arizona, where immigrants appear in a group before a judge, who often deported them for being here illegally after two quick questions.

Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., a professor of English and American studies and acting chair of the English department, said he knew a little about the crisis at the border before heading there, but learned a lot from the trip. He was surprised to learn, for instance, that a wall was constructed through the middle of the Nogales in 1994, long before President Donald Trump made building a border wall his signature campaign promise.

‘Never Got to Say Goodbye’

Although he does not speak Spanish, he was able to connect with a 6-year old girl at the comedor whose father was washing dishes nearby.

“It was an incredible joy to make a child who was going through a horrific experience laugh,” he said.

“The next day, we were serving a meal, and I heard a little girl yelling ‘hola, hola,’ and it was the same little girl again. She was happy to see me, and I was happy to see her. But there were so many people there, that they just got rushed out. So, I never got to say goodbye to this little girl. For some reason, that just broke my heart.”

Speaking with the border patrol complicated the picture for Hendler because it showed how difficult the job is, but it did not change his mind about the moral implications of the situation. In fact, he said he now felt more emotionally connected to what had previously been an abstract concept. He also said that the bonding experience he had with the other nine faculty was “very powerful.”

Accompany, Humanize, Complicate

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, echoed this, saying she was moved by the possibility of future projects at Fordham. Her scholarship touches on issues related to the border, so she was familiar with the situation. But she was moved to learn things like why black water bottles are a must for those crossing the border at night. (They don’t reflect moonlight).

“We were told to accompany, humanize, and complicate. To see those real items that our guide had collected on hikes through the desert, and also to see people get out of a van who’d been deported and go into the soup kitchen we were working in, was something that really stood out,” she said.

She was also shocked at the level of needless suffering taking place. When people are deported to Mexico for instance, they are given back any cash they had on them when they were apprehended in the form of a check. But the checks are only cashable in the United States, so once a week, a nonprofit group called No More Deaths visits the comedor to help people cash them. She also wasn’t impressed with the judge who spoke to them after presiding over the deportation proceedings.

“He said, ‘I’m just carrying out my marching orders.’ And I thought, ‘You’re a lawyer. You could leave and get a different job.’”

She felt more empathy toward border patrol agents. “They have fewer choices, and their job sounds really hard,” she said. “I found it really complicated to parse it all.”

McCartin said the goal of the trip was to give faculty members an experience different from their everyday work life that would also then affect their work life. The group will reunite soon for debriefing and discussion of possible future plans.

One conversation that will always stay with him happened when a man from Honduras asked him if Americans all thought they were criminals.

“I said ‘Oh gosh, no, I have no problem with you.’ This guy was like, ‘Really? I can’t believe that.’ I said ‘No, I can see how you have a sense that that’s how Americans talk about you, and there are plenty of them that do, but there are also a lot of us that don’t really begrudge you trying to have a better life,’” he said.

“This moment of his being surprised that we’re not unified in our attitudes toward people at the border—a lightbulb went on for this guy, and I’ll remember that.”

Carrying Their Stories Back Home

Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president and presidential assistant for planning in the Office of Mission Integration and Planning, said the trip was a necessity, given how immigration is now a major global challenge.

“Because this is such a major social issue and it impacts questions of justice, what we want to be as a society, and how a place like Fordham, as a Jesuit university, tries to develop students, we decided the border would be a great site for this immersion experience for a diverse group of faculty members,” he said.

Reich is making sure the issue lives on, having structured the syllabus of one of her spring classes, Films of Moral Struggle, to include representations of borders and migration. The class is also sending Easter cards to people in detention at the border to bring a little color and humanity into their lives, she said.

Above all, she said she’ll hold onto memories of conversations with the migrants she met, like one with a man at the comedor who was sporting a University of Michigan hat. He’d lived in the U.S. for 22 years before being deported after being stopped for a traffic violation.

“I will always carry their stories with me,” Reich said.

Photos courtesy of Fordham faculty.

Last winter, game designer and artist Mary Flanagan, the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, came to Fordham as part of the New Media and Digital Design’s inaugural lecture series. Flanagan discussed humanist gaming, the idea of incorporating social sensitivities into games.

The New Media and Digital Design program bridges technology and the humanities through a joint effort between the communication department and the departments of Computer and Information Science, Visual Arts, English, and the Gabelli School of Business.

Flanagan didn’t start out in technology. She studied film for her undergraduate degree. She said that many gamers, like herself, come with a background in humanities and that makes for some pretty good games, games that refer back to literature, film, and art.

“When you hang out with game designers, everyone has really broad values,” she said. “In games you can invoke a poem or a book.”

“If anything, the humanities let us think big. And that’s helpful.”

Flanagan’s broad-based background speaks to the adaptability of the humanities as they relate to technology. Not everyone is going to be a programmer, but almost everyone uses technology on some level.

At the close January’s Fordham-FBI 2015 International Conference on Cyber Security, academics, computer scientists, and special agents mixed at a cocktail reception. As the conference focuses on cyberthreats, the conversation veered to technology. Stephen Flatley, a senior computer forensic examiner at the FBI, said that even those with a strong programming background need communication skills.

“A lot of it is figuring out how to explain things to other people, whether it’s attorneys on their level, or someone who is tech savvy on their level,” he said.

As Fordham professors and alumni with backgrounds in humanities merge their interests with technology, communication between techies and other interests has become increasingly important. People with basic knowledge of what technology can do to enhance their area of interest—whether it be cultural studies or art history—have become bridge builders. But for many, the progression from humanities to technology was a natural one that sprang from their interests, as opposed to a conscious decision.

From Humanities to Tech

Glenn Hendler, PhD, professor and chair of the English department, first began to use the wiki technology when editing his textbook Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press, 2006), a series of essays on various keywords used in the discipline. When the book’s first edition came out, Hendler started a wiki (a web application that allows for collaborative modification of content) for the project.

When the second edition was released late last year, 30 of the terms were made available online. Students could engage with the text, via a wiki called the Keywords Collaboratory. College classes from across the nation now use Hendler’s wiki, with students working on the same word together at the same time. And in the process of writing the book, Hendler has become wiki-smart, although he’d hardly call himself an expert.

“Knowing how to code is the divide,” said Hendler. “A wiki is built on PHP. Well, I’ve never seen PHP. But I can work with Kanchan Thaokar, the tech manager at IT, and say I want this existing technology to do this because that’s going to help me teach what I’m trying to teach.”

From Tech to Humanities, and Back Again…

When Christopher Adams, GSAS ’11, was getting his master’s degree in philosophy, he assisted Patrick Hornbeck, PhD, associate professor of theology, to digitize 10,000 pages of the medieval philosophical text, The Latin Works of John Wyclif, making it available online for free for the first time.

Adams had taught himself coding when he was young, so he was able to write the web application and manage the effort. The project helped transition him back into software engineering from philosophy.

“You don’t need a degree in computer science to get into software engineering,” said Adams. “There are a lot of programs that you can use to qualify yourself. I used the Fordham project to get another part-time role, and that helped build my resume.”

Adams is now a software engineer with the popular payment app Venmo. He allowed that it’s as important for the academy to invest in computer science programs as it is to “reshape classic disciplines using tools and analysis provided by modern technology.” And choosing philosophy over computer science doesn’t disqualify one for a career in software engineering.

“There’s a fear that majoring in something that you’re interested in may harm your job opportunities, it could actually be very impressive to a potential employer,” he said. “They see that and think ‘What an interesting background.’”

Art and Technology

As the spring season began to emerge from what seemed like a never-ending winter, the openings and launches began: book launches, play openings, art openings. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Helena Guzik, FCRH ’12, stood near a bank of laptop computers explaining The Artist Project, an online video gallery of contemporary artists discussing their favorite works at the museum.

Guzik, an assistant editor of online publications at the Met, majored in art history at Fordham. She now finds herself working on several digital projects at the Met, including the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, which generates about two-thirds of the website’s traffic.

“If someone had told me I would be working in digital media six years ago, I would have laughed because I don’t have formal experience in code,” she said. “A lot of it I’ve learned on the job.”

Guzik, like Hendler, doesn’t write code, though she can go behind the site and make tweaks when necessary. But she understands technology enough to know how to communicate between programmers and art historians. She continues her passion for research, but also works on web production.

“For The Artist Project I worked on both ends of the spectrum: I researched the artists and the works of art they would discuss, and then in web production I input content into the site,” she said. “My humanities background has obviously been helpful for the research, but it also assits in approaching the site creatively and intellectually, which is a really good way to go about online publishing. That way everything isn’t entirely driven by the backend.”