Click on any full-time faculty member's name below to learn more about their education, publications, and research and teaching interests.
Full-time Faculty
Dr. Jim Castonguay has been chair of the Media Studies and Digital Culture Department since 2001 and is the author of several articles on film, television, and digital culture. He is the 2005 recipient of Sacred Heart University's Marian Calabrese Outstanding Faculty Award, and he has served as the Information Technology Officer and Webmaster for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. In 1998, Prof. Castonguay was awarded the University Film and Video Association's Carole Fielding Research Grant for a project on early film spectatorship.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb has been a professor at Sacred Heart University since 1976. He is the editor of the George Herbert Journal, co-editor of the Hitchcock Annual, and has edited Hitchcock on Hitchcock (Univ. of California Press), Framing Hitchcock (Wayne State University Press), Hitchcock: Interviews (Univ. of Mississippi Press), and Roberto Rosselini's Rome Open City (Cambridge University Press). Dr. Gottlieb's collection of Welles's writings is forthcoming, and he has published essays on Hitchcock, Welles, Eisenstein, Capra, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Vaughan, Sterne, and Austen, among others.
Dr. Debbie Danowski is a former journalist who has written more than 100 articles for both national and local publications, including First For Women, Woman's Day and Seventeen Magazine. She has also appeared on the Fox News network’s program, The O’Reilly Factor, as an expert panelist on emotional eating. At Sacred Heart University, Dr. Danowski is the advisor to both the student newspaper, the Spectrum, and the student magazine, Pioneer. She is also a member of the University's Eating Disorders Prevention Team, the IDEAL committee, and the URI committee.
Dr. Andrew Miller spent six years working as an assistant director in the Hollywood film and television industry before completing his Ph.D. in Cultural and Critical Studies. His credits include work on the popular 1990s television series, Beverly Hills 90210, and Oliver Stone’s film, The Doors. Dr. Miller is currently working on a book that engages with the cultural history of the American sports film, and he has recently produced an educational DVD for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York.
Dr. Sara Ross joined the MSDC faculty in 2006 after serving as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Hartford, where she taught 16mm filmmaking and multimedia production. Dr. Ross is the co-editor of the Archival News section of Cinema Journal, the journal for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Dr. Tricia Jenkins is the newest hire in the Media Studies and Digital Culture Department and started in the fall of 2007. She serves as an editorial advisory board member for The Journal of Popular Culture and once served the publication as its Technology Director. Before completing her graduate work in American media studies, Dr. Jenkins worked as a technical writer for an insurance software company and as a newspaper journalist in Texas.
Gregory J. Golda is the owner and designer of Construkt Media Studios, a multimedia production company specializing in audio and video production as well a graphic, web and theater design. He also serves the university as the Coordinator of Multimedia Productions on campus. Prof. Golda was a finalist for the 2005 Marian Calabrese Outstanding Faculty Award and serves as the Faculty Advisor to the Media Students Association (for which he was awarded the Advisor of the Year at the Campus Life Leadership Awards).
Part-time Faculty
Joanne Kabak is a journalist and author based in Westport, Connecticut. She has collaborated on four books and is widely published in newspapers and magazines. She has an MBA from Columbia University and practiced as a CPA in New York City before starting her own writing and consulting business, Clarity Communications.
Robert Lisak is a photographer based in New Haven and has taught both traditional and digital photography courses at SHU for the past fourteen years. He is a member of the ASMP and has an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art.
Garret Maynard is a graduate of the USC School of Cinema/Television. He spent eight years working in the film industry on the West coast and the last twelve as a cinematographer, WGAe literary agent and media studies instructor at several universities in Connecticut.
Mike Reynolds, a native of Chicago now living in Meridan, Connecticut, has been teaching at Sacred Heart University for the past five years. When not teaching, he freelances as an advertising and PR writer, and video/live event producer for clients as diverse as Unilever, Bayer, and Seiko. Mike holds a BA in Humanities from Loyola University of Chicago and a Master of Fine Arts in Theatre from the Catholic University of America. In 2005 he was elected to Meriden's Board of Education.
Full-time Staff
Elizabeth Cross serves as the Media Studies and Digital Culture Department’s administrative assistant. She manages the department's equipment and its film library, among numerous other tasks.