Our Contributors
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.
Jess Gallagher (they/any) After receiving their BA in English from the University of Connecticut and MA in Human Rights Studies from Columbia University, Jess has focused on preserving community-based archives and museums, specifically collections related to disability history across various affinity communities. They have worked as a researcher on the Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum Project—assisting in identifying notable collections/documents and curating content for the project’s first website. Receiving their MLIS from Simmons University in Archives Management, Jess works as a Librarian at Quincy College and serves on the Board of Directors at Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance as the Associate Director for Archives and Museum Preservation. They have mainly worked in museum, medical, and community archives while pursuing their degree. As an archivist and librarian, their research centers on archiving disability throughout history—specifically focusing on the ways archival literature and practice have historically prioritized medical narratives rather than the ways in which disability and people with disabilities are documented, often resulting in a narrow, medicalized representation that fails to capture the complex, intersectional lives of disabled people.
Ashten Vassar-Cain (he/him) is an alum of the UConn Human Rights Master’s program, and an aspiring archivist pursuing an MLIS from Simmons University. His research interests include medicalization, state violence, Disability Justice, and reparative archival studies. Ashten works with a grassroots network of activists and institutional abuse survivors who seek to reclaim power and build community through education and collaborative organizing. The Mansfield Training School Project has taken Ashten and the MTS research team to archives, classrooms, and graveyards throughout Connecticut. He hopes that the work done by the MTS project team helps ensure that the lives of those impacted by institutionalization are not forgotten.
Matt Iannantuoni (he/him) is a student at Quinnipiac University School of Law, class of 2026. He graduated from UConn in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in English. He comes from a family with a wide range of disabilities, which led him to take Brenda’s wonderful course Disability in American Literature and Culture. This course led him 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. While he keeps an open mind regarding future specialties, he hopes to implement disability advocacy into whatever he practices.
Madison Bigelow (she/her) is currently a J.D. candidate at Rutgers Law School. She is a Marsha Wenk Fellow for the 2025-26 academic year, where she will intern at the ACLU of N.J. and work to preserve access to civil liberties while supporting the public interest law community. Her legal interests lie at the intersection of constitutional rights, metropolitan equity, affordable housing, and land use. She recently received her BA in English from the University of Connecticut. During her time at UConn, she also worked as an researcher on the Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum Project. There, she contributed to archival research efforts, reviewed state legislative history concerning institutionalization and healthcare policy, authored materials featured on the project’s website, and presented her findings to various academic and community audiences.
Hannah (she/her) is a Vietnamese American writer and student at the University of Connecticut. She is majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing as well as writing and composition studies. Poet at heart, Hannah’s enamor for all things writing has blossomed ever since she was young, and now, she is studying to pursue her dream of a career in publishing and releasing books of her own. Aside that, Hannah is a mentor at UConn’s Asian/Asian American Mentoring Program, an undergraduate tutor at UConn’s Writing Center, a member of UConn’s Long River Review, and a blog moderator for the Disability & Access Collective Blog. If she is not burying her nose in a novel, Hannah loves to binge anime and manga, consume healthy doses of rock and heavy metal music, and snuggle with her pet bunnies.
Gabriella DiSalvo (she/her), but everyone calls me Gabby. I’m a rising senior at UConn, majoring in Disability Studies in Media and Food Culture. I am from Staten Island, New York. I also run a cooking and advocacy blog on social media called Cooking on Wheels. Here, I advocate for the disability community, post my own recipes, and share my experiences as a disabled college student. I love dogs, cooking, and all things purple.
Additional Contributors:
Paula Mock
Lillian Stockford
Ally LeMaster
Tahmina Akter
Olivia Birbara
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