Garret L. Castleberry is Associate Professor and Program Director of Communication, Media, and Ethics for the College of Adult and Graduate Studies at Mid-America Christian University. He received his Ph.D. in Mass and Political Communication from the University of Oklahoma. He received his M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of North Texas combining areas of Rhetoric and Performance Studies.
Garret has served as Director of Speech/Debate at the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma City University while also teaching courses in Mass Media Criticism, Cultural Studies, Public Relations, Digital Political Communication, and Social Media Presence.
He has published numerous essays and book chapters on popular culture, including criticism featured in special issues of Cultural Studies<=>Critical Methodologies and the International Review of Qualitative Research, as well as chapters appearing in Television, Social Media, and Fan Culture (Lexington, 2015), The ESPN Effect (Peter Lang, 2015), and Communication Theory and Millennial Popular Culture (Peter Lang, 2016).
Garret wrangled his way into wrestling at the twilight of the territory days when the WWF came of age. He watched some with his dad, and knew of his grand dad’s interest in wrestling novelty, but mostly watched alone in the heyday of the “Monday Night Wars” and “Attitude Era”. He prefers house shows over TV tapings and was seduced into buying the WWE Network in an effort to reclaim his birthright via access to vintage PPV’s he could never afford as a child.
Like his father and grandfather before him, Garret loves (physically) wrasslin’ with his young boys, although he’s unsure about an “appropriate” age when they will be old enough to watch pro wrestling. He does however, on rare occasion, let them watch a match or two of New Japan Pro Wrestling.
Garret organized a “Racism in Wrestling” week for the scholarly website In Media Res, and offers alternative TV criticism with the online journal Flow and cultural site PopMatters.