Ery Caswell is a Student Success & Engagement Librarian and liaison to Human Rights at the UConn Library. He assists with library outreach programming, information literacy and research instruction, and student success and support initiatives for undergraduate students. Prior to working at UConn, he was a public librarian who facilitated creative writing groups, designed community education programming, and fostered library partnerships with human services organizations. In 2023, he was an inaugural fellow of the Radical Librarianship Institute at the UCLA California Rare Books School. In 2020, he worked with the San Francisco Public Library’s Department of Jail & Reentry Services, providing reference by mail and reentry support to incarcerated people. He manages a small mobile social justice library that circulates at related education events with justice-informed community organizations and coalitions. Ery has an MLIS from the University of Rhode Island and a BA in Writing and Politics from Ithaca College. Beyond the stacks, he enjoys hiking, gardening, participating in writing groups, and wandering around queer digital archives.
Author: Kimberley Giard
Cassetti, Sara
Sara Cassetti is the Access Services Coordinator for the Jeremy Richard Library at the Stamford campus. She earned her BAs in Cultural Anthropology and Spanish from Indiana University, her MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from San Francisco State University, and her MLIS from San Jose State University. Sara worked at various libraries throughout the state of California since 2006, including public, research university, and community college libraries. She is committed to ensuring that library access services positively impact the student experience at UConn Stamford, and she approaches her work from a student success, social justice and DEI perspective.
Breeden, Amanda
Amanda Breeden functions as a project manager and outreach lead for Greenhouse Studio’s Sourcery project. Originally from North Carolina, she has a BA in History from the University of North Carolina at Asheville where she focused her studies on material culture during the Industrial Revolution. Amanda also holds an MS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a concentration in Archives and Records Management. She worked previously at the Forest History Society in Durham, NC, where she processed and appraised the Society of American Foresters Collection in order to prepare it for public use by researchers. Most recently she worked as a Processing Archivist with the Knights of Columbus where she processed new accessions. Amanda also currently works part-time at the New Haven Free Public Library as a Reference Librarian.
Cresci Callahan, Maureen
Maureen Cresci Callahan is director of Archives and Special Collections, where she supports the team’s mission of bearing witness of the wide diversity of human accomplishment and creativity by providing access to archives. She believes that archives are engines for empathy and provide the opportunity for us all to understand the world differently through the careful study of another person’s life and work.
Maureen is very active in the world of archival standards and is currently part of the leadership team for the national best practices group for archival accessioning. She had been co-chair of the Society of American Archivists’ technical subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard where she led that group’s effort to revise the core principles of archival description. She formerly worked as a curator of the women’s history archives at Smith College and as an archival technologist at Yale University, New York University, and Princeton University. Maureen is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the University of Michigan.
Areas of expertise
- Archival technical services
- Archives and library standards
- Metadata management and system integration
- Archival acquisition and appraisal
- 20th century US women’s history
Rodriguez, Kenia
Kenia is the Project Manager for the Connecticut Digital Archive and Connecticut Humanities joint initiative, My Town My Story, a program designed to establish, execute, and sustain free and accessible digital community archives for Connecticut’s historically underrepresented populations. Kenia is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in English at the University of Connecticut. Her current research focuses on implementing computational tools and methods to analyze issues of citizenship and gender in contemporary young adult literature by Latino authors.
Burkholder, Kristen
Kristen Burkholder is Head of Access & Visitor Services at the Homer Babbidge Library on the Storrs campus. She collaborates with other staff to create the best experience possible for library patrons and is always looking for new ways to improve the library’s services. Kristen has worked in academic libraries since 2010 and holds an M.L.I.S. from the University of Oklahoma, an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Minnesota, and a B.A. in History from Scripps College. In her free time, she reads widely and voraciously and writes the occasional piece of fanfiction.
Professional Affiliations
Publications
- “Dreaming of Eggs and Bacon, Seedcakes and Scones.” In The Hobbit and History, edited by Janice Liedl and Nancy R. Reagin. Nashville, TN: Wiley, 2014.
- “Threads Bared: Dress and Textiles in Late Medieval English Wills.” Medieval Clothing and Textiles 1 (April 2005): 133-53.
- “‘Attempree diete was al hir phisik’: The Medieval Application of Medical Theory to Feasting.” In Social Practice in the Middle Ages, edited by Thomas H. Bestul and Thomas N. Hall. Essays in Medieval Studies 13. Illinois Medieval Association, 1997.
Paul, Ian
Ian is the Digital Imaging Technician in the Library’s Imaging Lab. He got his start working as a student photographer for UConn Library under the direction of Michael J. Bennett while completing his BA in Anthropology. After graduating, he continued to work in the Imaging Lab, digitizing materials from The Maurice Sendak Foundation’s archive. This included finished artwork for his published books, certain manuscripts, preliminary sketches, color overlays, and dummy books created by Maurice Sendak. Ian returned to UConn from MIT Libraries, where he worked with rare and fragile materials from MIT’s Institute Archives and Distinctive Collections. This included photographs and architectural drawings from the Aga Khan Visual Archive, manuscript materials from the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel Records, and much more.
Walsh, Robert
Rob Walsh is the Waterbury Campus Library Director. He never thought he would be a librarian when he grew up, but he is glad he is. At the heart of Rob’s approach is his passion for empowering students to engage critically with information. He collaborates closely with Waterbury’s faculty to integrate information literacy into the curriculum in innovative ways, so that students develop the critical sensibilities needed both inside and outside of the classroom.
Rob holds an MLS from Southern Connecticut State University and an MA in African American Studies from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Outside of work, Rob can be found riding (and occasionally racing) bicycles, coaching kids to race bicycles, and trying to stay warm at hockey rinks across the Northeast where his kids pursue their dream of one day playing as a Husky.
Areas of expertise
- Critical Pedagogy
- Popular Culture
Professional Affiliations
Wilcox, Ieshia
Finegan, Kate
Kate Finegan is a Marketing & Publicity Assistant for the UConn Library. In ten years of working in the field of communication, Kate has assisted organizations both big and small in creating and implementing effective communication and public relations strategies. She enjoys using her content creation skills (writing, video production, graphic design) to collaborate on marketing assets that educate, entertain and inspire internal and external audiences. Kate earned her B.S. in Communication with a minor in Digital Art and Design from Eastern Connecticut State University.
Kate’s weekends typically include competitive pinball, practicing classical guitar, playing board games, and curling up with her cat and a good book.