SHARE Summer 2023: Research Opportunity with Dr. Brenda Brueggemann

Project Mentor

Dr. Brenda Brueggemann
Departments: English; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; American Studies

Research Project Overview:

The UConn -“Mansfield Training School” Cross-Institutional History: A Memorial and Museum.

This collaborative project excavates a historical, rhetorical, cross-institutional, and multiple-identities archeology of the relationship between the University of Connecticut and the Mansfield Training School (formerly The Connecticut School for Imbeciles at Lakeville from 1860-1914 and then also The Connecticut Training School for the Feebleminded at Lakeville from 1915-1917).

Disabled lives have long been institutionalized lives. Schools, rehabilitation and support services, medical treatments, institutionalized buildings, and regimented encounters — all these, and more, constitute institutional spaces that intersect, order, and oversee the lives of people with disabilities. In Jay Dolmage’s 2017 book, Academic Ableism, as he writes about “eugenic mergers” around disability on college campuses, he also makes the following historical, cross-institutional connection:

While land-grant universities were popping up in rural spaces, asylums were popping up in other, nearby rural settings–on old farms and abandoned land. Yet the two institutions were often tightly hinged or merged together. From within one privileged space, academics were deciding the fate of others in similar, yet somehow now pathological, other, and impure spaces. (49)

This UConn-MTS collaborative project excavates Dolmage’s premise regarding cross-institutional connections between sites of higher education (like UConn) and state “psychiatric” institutions in the 20th century more locally.

The former Mansfield Training School (MTS) sits seven miles west of UConn’s main campus at Storrs, CT, sprawling across 350 acres. It is currently known as “The Depot Campus” –although it is not an active campus site and most of its many buildings are boarded up, fenced around, and graffiti-marked. Piles and piles of records literally rot inside those buildings, now declared “irretrievable.” Many now claim, of course, that the campus is haunted.

This project is a haunting and excavation of another kind. We’ve already spent over a dozen extended days this last 2021-2022 academic year in the archives beginning this project: last Fall 2021 in the Dodd Center’s Archives & Special collections, explicitly exploring all materials they have on the MTS-UConn connections; and then six full Fridays throughout February-June 2022 in the CT State Library and Archives in downtown Hartford. In those six day-long three-team archival visits, we’ve been working our way through around 50+ boxes of materials they have related to the (troubled) history of MTS. We aren’t done yet.

No history has ever been completed on the 133-year “life” of the Mansfield training institute, 1860-1993. And no research has yet mapped the intensive, entangled, and often fraught, relationships between MTS throughout all its years and the University of Connecticut. Our project tells that history and draws that map. We’ve drafted, for example, a timeline –that continues to grow with every new box of archival materials we open. The appendix will also offer a few snapshots from the UConn Memorial and Museum for the Mansfield Training School website we’ve been building all summer 2022. This memorial website comes at the suggestion of UConn archivist, Betsy Pittman, and its start-up was funded with UConn-CLAS summer research funding in Summer 2022.

No study like this is currently published or digitally available. Among many other hopes and dreams for the project, we would like for it to become a model of how this kind of disability history, archival, and community-sourced work could be done in other U.S. locations between community and college where a disability institutionalization history intertwines them.

This is an American studies and disability studies project centered around American history and the U.S. social-medical experience for people with disabilities. It follows from the work of other significant disability historians who have mapped the institutionalized landscape of disability in America: Liat Ben-Moshe; Susan Burch; Kim Nielsen; Zosha Stuckey; James Trent (to name but a few). This project grounds itself in social justice / disability justice approaches and activism fused with the humanities through cultural, anthropological, historical and archival approaches. In this fusion, this project intersects considerably with the new work of the Ford Foundation’s Disability rights funding/program.

With Summer 2022 funding from UConn’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (CLAS), a preliminary memorial museum website for this project has now been established; there are currently 5 blog posts and, an over-arching timeline, and around 30 artifacts currently deposited there. The website won’t be opened/launched until likely Fall 2023 – after more content is created and after consultations on full accessibility features of the website have been carried out.

Role of a SHARE Summer Apprentice:

The Summer 2023 OUR Research Apprentice on this project will work with me –and a graduate research assistant — on any or all of the following:

  • Completing a rich historical and exhibit / artifact engaged website for both the general public and for college and grade 6-12 students.
  • Preparing and giving presentations on the project for (at least) two major national conferences in 2023 and perhaps also for several UConn events.
  • Drafting a (digital) book proposal for the project.
  • Writing for further funding from state and national sources that would extend the engagement and collaborative building of the project. (Connecticut Humanities and The Ford Foundation’s new funded initiative on disability advocacy and art are two of the main targets.)
  • Spending several day-long archival visits to the CT State Archives (Van Block Avenue, Hartford, CT); ideally these would take place mid-May to mid-June 2023 and one in mid-August 2023.
  • Scanning/ storage or relevant archival materials into the project folders.
  • Creating transcripts of our post-archives meetings/discussions/ conversations.
  • Drafting visual description of all images and artifacts on to be placed on the memorial-museum website (WordPress).
  • Writing a few blog posts on artifacts, documents, narratives from the archival research.

Summer Schedule/Time Commitment:

The time commitment for this project is very flexible and I will happily work with the research apprentice to create a schedule based on their best time/work/travel plans and commitments throughout the summer (this includes working and meeting in evening hours or on the weekend).

Ideally, I would prefer to meet with the research apprentice at least once a week (on Zoom or Google Meets) for 30-60 min. conversations and check-ins.

If possible, I would like the research apprentice to to join me (and a graduate research assistant working on the same project) for a planned 3 (different) days at the Connecticut State Archives warehouse (near downtown Hartford) for a full-day of archival work with the boxes of materials from the former Mansfield Training School. The current plans are for those 3 days to take place between mid-May to mid-June 2023. This participation is not a requirement for the project –but it would be of great value to the project and to the student in gaining rich archival and interpretive experience. If the apprentice does not have a car to get to the State Archives warehouse, I will work with them on transportation and help make sure they get there.

Preferred Qualifications:

I am mostly interested, overall, in a research apprentice who is curious and wants to learn new skills and investigate –and write about — a significant piece of Connecticut’s and UConn’s (and the United States) history that has been significantly closeted, erased, unattended to. The qualifications bulleted below are “ideals” and not requirements.

Ideal qualifications:

  • interest in American, Connecticut, UConn history
  • interest in social justice and human rights (especially in relationship to disability)
  • interest in archival interpretation and exploratory writing (especially in relationship to disability)
  • willing to imagine and think outside the box (literally and figuratively) as we excavate the available (and missing) materials and narratives from the Mansfield Training School
  • skills at (or interest in) writing blog posts about the artifacts, materials, narratives surrounding the Mansfield Training School (and especially its relationship with UConn)
  • skills at (or interest in) WordPress and basic website design

To Apply:

The application is closed.