SHARE Summer 2025: Research Opportunity with Dr. Brenda Brueggemann

Project Mentor

Dr. Brenda Brueggemann
Department: English; Social & Critical Inquiry

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 only 1.5 miles west of UConn’s main campus at Storrs, CT, on Rt. 44. 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, grossly vandalized and 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 400 hours in the archives since beginning this project in Fall 2021 in the Dodd Center’s Archives & Special collections, explicitly exploring all materials they have on the MTS-UConn connections. Since that beginning exploration, the project has continued in these sites: voluminous hours in the Connecticut State Library and Archives (where 101 boxes of MTS materials are kept); the Mansfield Historical Society (they have a historical exhibit about the closing of the “School” in 1993; the Mansfield Town Hall (where all residents of the Mansfield Training School’s deaths from 1918 through its closing in 1993 are on record); and the Yale Divinity School Archives (where the founder, Henry Knight, has papers on record). We aren’t done yet.

There have been four public/academic presentations to diverse audiences about the project, a documentary film screening at the UConn Libraries, and a summer working group of 10 scholars from around the U.S. who are also doing research on “the histories and legacies of disability institutionalization in the U.S.” at other locations.

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. This project tells that history and draws that map. 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, human rights, social justice, and disability studies project centered around American history and the U.S. social-medical experience for people with disabilities.

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 here: https://mtsmemorialmuseumuconn.com/

Significant funding has also come from the UConn Senate’s JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) grants for 2022-2023 and the UConn Humanities Institute for the development of a series of 18 educational/exhibit poster boards aimed at a general or school-age audience about the Mansfield Training School and its history. Finally, funding and support also took place from the SHARE Summer research program in Summer 2023; the two students involved in that summer 2023 program have graduated and gone onto careers/jobs that are directly related to their work with this project.

Role of a SHARE Summer Apprentice:

Elements of the project that could take place over Summer 2025 with a SHARE apprentice contribution to the work, include any/all of the following (specific elements and contributions will be discussed with an apprentice to best fit their summer SHARE contributions with their current skills, as well as any new elements they might want to experiment with and learn with/from):

  • Drafting workshops/curriculum for various audiences, engaging with the history and artifacts/angles of the Mansfield Training School: for the general public; for college students; and for grade 6-12 students. Workshops varying from 1.5-3 hours.
  • Read, annotate, analyze some primary documents:
    –The April 1981 U.S. Congressional hearings on “deinstitutionalization” that took place at the statehouse in Hartford, with over 92 witness testimonies
    –The (famous) Connecticut Association of Retarded Citizens (CARC) vs. Thorne case that finally closed down the Mansfield Training School in 1993
    –The newspaper articles, op-eds, and speeches given in relation to the MTS closing in 1993 (including those at UConn).
    –Homer Babbidge (UConn President) records, letters, speeches and statements in relation to the Mansfield Training School in the 1960s
  • 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.)
  • If possible/available (but not required since this involves being “on-site”): Spending several day-long archival visits to the CT State Archives (75 Van Block Avenue, Hartford, CT);
  • Organizing and labeling/cataloguing more carefully all of the current scanned materials (documents and photographs, etc) that have already been collected for the MTS project.
  • Drafting audio-visual description of all images and artifacts on to be placed on the memorial-museum website
    MTS Timeline expansion on the website: https://mtsmemorialmuseumuconn.com/timeline-and-events/
  • Data analysis and organized spreadsheets of any of the following sets of documents from archives:
    — Death certificates from MTS residents 1918-1993
    — The “restraint logs” of MTS residents kept in the early 1960s (and still in the archives)
    — The voluminous “Thank You” notes for charity/donations to MTS in the 1960s
    — A summary of the prolific “policies” developed for staff and residents by MTS superintendents
  • Perhaps writing a few blog posts on artifacts, documents, narratives from the archival research that is catalogued so far
  • Assist in designating, organizing, and convening the (first) MTS Memorial Project Advisory Board (local/community but also national and regional authorities and scholars, alongside existing family members of former MTS residents, and former MTS staff members still alive)
  • Again, the SHARE Summer 2025 research interns will first work with me to determine their work plan based on their own interests, skill sets, and willingness to learn and be challenged at new tasks.

What will be learned from this apprenticeship? At least these 4 major things, along with a variety of other

  • The complexities of this significant part of American history that is often left untouched and its continued present-day impacts.
  • The political, educational, economic, legal, social, familial dynamics of disability institutionalization.
  • The annotation, analysis, and organization of archival documents of many different kinds
  • Critical, ethical, and creative/imaginative approaches to working with archival materials that are about real lives and experiences

Summer Schedule/Time Commitment:

The hours they work will be greatly flexible (for them). We will discuss vacation/away times they know they won’t be able to do much work on the project throughout the summer. And we will create an overall Summer Work Map for them (that can be adjusted somewhat as the summer develops, if necessary). Sample time/work commitments might look like the following:

  • 1-1.5 hour weekly meeting + 9-8.5 hour additional “solo” work hours over 10 weeks
  • 1-1.5 hour weekly meeting with 12-15 hours of additional “solo” work each week for 7-8 weeks, Etc.

A schedule will be created together, also ensuring the intern’s ability to self-motivate, take responsibility, develop a steady work plan. There is much flexibility in this scheduling!

The project’s total work span is flexible anywhere from mid-May to mid-August.

Preferred Qualifications:

All majors and areas of disciplinary focus are welcome to apply for this summer research. Both qualitative/narrative analysis and quantitative skills could bring some value to the project given the range of things that need to be done. A willingness to learn and engage with a very difficult –and largely unknown but also substantial – part of America’s history (and Connecticut’s history) is the primary qualification/criteria.

These additional qualities (rather than qualifications) are preferred, but not required:
— Interest in social justice and human rights (especially in relationship to disability and subjects who aren’t often engaged to “speak for themselves”)
— Interest in archival interpretation and exploratory writing (especially in relationship to disability)
— Interest in developing curriculum/educational workshops
— Interest in creating data spreadsheets (and analyzing the contents)
— Interest in deeply engaging, annotating, and analyzing primary historical documents – from political, legal, policy, and institutional angles
— Willingness 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)

Summer interns will receive full credit for their work and their bio, etc. will be added to the project website as a valued research team member. They will be invited to engage in future project funding applications and/or community or academic presentations about the work (though they can always decline). A degree of self-motivation and responsibility is needed to carry out this work “virtually” and with integrity. The work does include some “hard things” – difficult materials and records related to the mistreatment, drug administration, restraint, and deaths of the MTS residents (over 133 years). And since it is material about Real People who didn’t/could “give consent” to their commitment to MTS, or anything that followed that commitment/admission, or to the records and documents “about them” (though all names are removed from the records), it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming and difficult to “stay” with. This is also one reason why a number of different elements for the summer work are suggested.

To Apply:

The application opens on Saturday, March 1, 2025.  Click here to submit an online application for this research apprenticeship through the Quest Portal. The application deadline is Friday, March 28, 2025, at 11:59pm.

Click here to view an outline of the general application questions. There are no additional questions for this apprenticeship.

Please note:
All students hired for a SHARE Summer apprenticeship must complete a federal I-9 form and present original documents in person to OUR staff as part of the hiring process. Visit this U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services page for more information about acceptable documents. You cannot begin working until this is complete. Students are encouraged to plan ahead for this. For example, if you are going home for spring break, consider bringing original documents back to campus with you.