Bucking a long-term trend, some very talented and
creative people are returning to Cleveland to ply their métier. In my own family, our daughter Patty found her way back
into a rewarding museum career path after being away for five years. I was pretty much resigned to her long-term
absence from the Cleveland scene, when much to my pleasure, she secured a
position in the education department of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Since November 2010, she has been a part of the
team fashioning Gallery One, a truly path-breaking endeavor to help visitors “learn how
works of art are made, where they come from, and why they are produced.” To do this, Gallery One makes innovative use of technology, so that art museums
across America now want to learn more and perhaps emulate what’s happening
here. Don’t need better testimony than a
piece in the New York Times last week, and some videos on the Fast Company
website, and of course on the CMA’s own site.
Not all, but many, roads now lead to Cleveland.
A broadly similar development marks the return of
Brandy Schillace to Cleveland, and I’ve welcomed her to share in this blog. I
first met Brandy in December 2007 when she was a grad student at CWRU and
assisting Woody Gaines (Anthropology) in editing Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.
Brandy came to the Dittrick in search of scientific and medical imagery to
fashion arresting covers for the journal, and I can recall being impressed by
her energy, enthusiasm, and determination.
Those same assets saw her successfully through the M.A. and Ph.D. in the
English department here. From that point
of departure, Brandy has developed into an interdisciplinary
medical-humanist scholar, who investigates the social and cultural impacts of
medical science on literature (and through literature, on readers). Thus, she finds herself at the intersection
of medicine, art, science and culture that we inhabit here at the Dittrick. We reconnected in the last couple of years
through her search for the original 18th century “machine”
(midwifery manikin) of William Smellie.
Alas, the trail went cold, but the search made for some fascinating
perambulations…
Brandy maintains her own blog, and explains to readers that
“her blog features two subsidiaries: The Fiction Reboot and Literary Medicine’s Daily Dose. The Reboot provides useful tips and
information for writers, weekly fiction features and interviews with authors of
fiction and poetry. Meanwhile, The Dose
honors, supports, and shares perspectives about medicine and humanities across
cultures and disciplines. She summarizes her perspective aptly, describing
herself as a “rogue scholar,” who looks forward to “branching out beyond the
discipline specific and into the wide and welcoming plains of
inter-disciplinarity. Fiction and literature, science and history, anthropology
and religion: Life is more interesting at the intersection.” Brandy also
clearly felt that, for her, Cleveland was the right place to make these
connections. For more on her work, check out her personal site.
So, we look
forward to collaborating with Brandy, and having her help bring the Dittrick to
kindred spirits, especially through this blog.
Jim Edmonson
