Brenda Jo Brueggemann is the Project Director for the Mansfield Training School Memorial & Museum @ UConn. She is a Professor of English, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at the University of Connecticut where she also serves as the Aetna Endowed Chair of Writing. In the glorious summers, she teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, Vermont. She has been deaf (genetic) from birth. After college, she taught high school in her rural Kansas community for five years before going back to graduate school. In the mid-1990s, bolstered by the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, she helped conceptualize the new field of Disability Studies. She has written, co-written, edited, or co-edited 16 books, including nine memoirs in the “Deaf Lives” series she created for Gallaudet University Press, and published more than 75 essays and articles at the intersections of Deaf/Disability Studies and writing/art. Her current research centers on disability and deafness in the visual, literary, and performance arts and recovering the public histories of abandoned psychiatric institutions in the United States, especially the Mansfield Training School and its deeply connected relationship with the University of Connecticut. She has been an ardent fan of both active learning and accessible learning and teaching practices (UDL) for two decades now; for example, she is the faculty coordinator for the Disability and Access Collective (DAC) Blog.
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Jess Gallagher (they/any) is the Project Co-Director for the Mansfield Training School Memorial & Museum @ UConn. Jess is a graduate student, pursuing an MA in Human Rights at Columbia University. Graduating from the University of Connecticut for their undergraduate degree in English and concentrations in Literature, Antiracism, and Social Justice and Creative Writing, Jess has worked as an Editorial Intern at Disability Studies Quarterly. Their concentration in human rights focuses on Disability Justice and Historic Preservation. Using the lens of History, Disability and Mental Health law, Abolition, Oral History, and Storytelling, Jess aims to work as a disability oral historian whose activism centers on grassroots organizing, uplifting the lived experiences of people with disabilities from across all identity markers, and preserving historical sites of conscience.
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Ashten Vassar (he/him) is a research apprentice working on the Mansfield Training School Memorial & Museum @ UConn. Ashten is an undergraduate studying Human Rights and Psychological Sciences, with a minor in American Studies. He is also pursuing an accelerated MA in Human Rights through the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. Ashten is passionate about Disability Justice and Disabled Liberation. He has served as the Accessibility Officer for UConn Unchain, and is a contributor to the newly established Disability & Access Collective Blog. He is dedicated to fostering community care, and affirming the agency of those who have been harmed and silenced by institutionalization. Ashten works in health promotion and harm reduction as a peer support coordinator, and hopes to continue to organize around the needs of the community. He is really excited to connect, learn, and create with others who share his interests in Disability Studies.
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Madison Bigelow (she/her) is an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut, currently pursuing a degree in English. In addition to collaborating with the MTS team, she is also a member of the Disability & Access Collective blog, where she works under Brenda Brueggemann to promote community-focused accessibility across the UConn campus (and beyond!). Moreover, she is currently the copy editing intern for UConn’s Meanings of Democracy Lab, in which she examines taxation, religious activism, and its moral implications in America’s political landscape. Her research interests currently include institutionalization, disability, rhetoric, and poetics across the 20th century.
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Paula Mock (she/her or they/them) is an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut majoring in both sociology and women, gender, and sexuality studies. They work part-time as a student aide in the UConn Child Development Labs, and they’ve held positions in other childcare-related fields in the past as well, ranging from literacy-based camps to museum programs. Currently, her main interests center around museums and other educational institutions, achieving equitable access to these spaces for all, and examining present systems of care (and how they rely disproportionately on women and AFAB people to function).
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Ally LeMaster (she/her) is an undergraduate student at University of Connecticut (UConn), majoring in English and journalism. In addition to her work with the MTS Memorial and Museum Project, she is the current editor-in-chief for the 27th edition of UConn’s undergraduate literary magazine Long River Review. Her work focuses on telling stories that have been forgotten by the passage of time.
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Hello!
My name is Lillian, and I am an undergraduate history major at UConn! I plan to pursue a career as an archivist, a path I have grown even more interested in throughout my college career. I have worked in the University archives, as well as taken classes related to the field. The Mansfield Training School project drew me in, both as someone interested in archives and a history major.
I am Matt Iannantuoni (He/Him,) I graduated from UConn in May of 2022 with a Bachelor’s degree in English. I have taken a non-traditional path to obtaining my degree and have spent much of my time working and traveling. I come from a family with a wide range of disabilities which is what led me to take Brenda’s wonderful course Disability in American Literature and Culture which led me down a path to discovering the founding and history of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which narrowed down a vague interest in law to a specific interest in Disability Law. I am taking a year off to do some meaningful work and apply to Law Schools and hope to one day become an ADA or otherwise disability-centered legal advocate
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And special thanks to our other contributors and friends along the way…
The Archivists @ the CT State Libraries, Allen Ramsey and Damon Munz.
Jay Dolmage and his book “Academic Ableism” for inspiring this project
Heather Cassano and her project “The Fate of Human Beings”
The UConn Humanities Institute for hosting our seminar “A Site of Conscience: The ‘Haunting’ Legacy at the Mansfield Training School” and funding our project
Bill @ the CT State Libraries
Devva Kasnitz, for sharing her story with us.
CUNY’s Disability Studies lecture series, “Ordinary People Changing Systems: Willowbrook: A Retrospective on Systems Change”
Zosha Stuckey’s book “A Rhetoric of Remnants”
Our friends who listened to us rave and rattle on about the project
Kim Nielsen & Susan Burch for their material about disability history in the archives
Betsy Pittmann, UConn Archivist
The Multiple Perspectives on Disability, Access, and Inclusion conference audiences of 2021 and 2022 who interacted with this project
The several disability studies classes, and students from them, at UConn and the Bread Loaf School of English
The Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum 