J.R to kick off series of WWE personalities at MIT

MIT University issued the following press release late yesterday announcing a series of lectures featuring World Wrestling Entertainment personalities this semester for a course focusing on professional wrestling:


Good Old JR heads to MIT!

WWE® RAW® Announcer Jim Ross™ Kicks Off Pro Wrestling Lecture Series At MIT

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 15, 2007 –"The Voice of Monday Night RAW" Jim Ross will kick off a series of class presentations and lectures involving WWE personalities to be held at MIT this semester as part of a Comparative Media Studies course focused on pro wrestling in America.

"Good Ol' J.R." Jim Ross will be speaking to students on Wednesday, March 21, and Thursday, March 22, to share his thoughts on the growth of pro wrestling into a global phenomenon through his experience as one of the greatest wrestling announcers ever in the business, as well as his role in handling talent relations and business development for World Wrestling Entertainment® (WWE). Ross will share experiences from his many years in the television industry, as the wrestling industry has moved from TV syndication to cable to pay-per-view to prime time broadcast television, and now to digital media, including DVD, video on demand, the web and mobile phones.

His appearance will culminate in a lecture to students and the public in Room 4-370 at 5 p.m. on March 22 entitled, "This One's Gonna Be a Slobberknocker: A Q&A with WWE's "Good Ol' J.R." Jim Ross," moderated by Sam Ford, the class instructor.

In addition to being the voice of WWE's "Monday Night RAW" on the USA Network and the former voice of Turner Broadcasting's World Championship Wrestling™, Jim Ross has served as Executive Vice President of Broadcasting for WCW® and as both Vice President of Talent Relations and Executive Vice President of Business Strategies for WWE. He is also a weekly college football columnist and runs his own blog and online Bar-B-Q store at http://www.jrsbarbq.com/.

Also scheduled to appear as part of the series is former WWE Champion and New York Times best-selling author Mick Foley™. He will lecture for two classes in April and offer a lecture to students and the public in room 54-100 on 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 12 entitled, "The Real World's Faker than Wrestling: Former WWE Champion and Best-Selling Author Mick Foley."

Foley, one of the top wrestling performers of the past decade, will talk about his own years as an entertainer and how he transitioned from a world of athletic storytelling into a world of storytelling with the written word, as he is a multiple-time bestselling author who has written three memoirs, two novels, and a variety of children's books. Foley will discuss his experience with telling stories in a variety of written and performance genres, and how he has managed to bridge across multiple genres and entertainment forms. He will also talk about his management of multiple personas within the pro wrestling world, the range of characters he portrayed that have often been considered the many faces of Foley.

Foley has been a professional wrestler since the mid-1980s and was a headlining star for World Wrestling Entertainment under the personas of Mankind, Cactus Jack, and Dude Love, all of whom were facets of the overall character, Mick Foley. He continues to wrestle and portray his character on occasion for the WWE and has just finished his third memoir, Hardcore Diaries, following the best-selling Have a Nice Day!: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks and Foley is Good...and the Real World is Faker than Wrestling.

For more on the MIT CMS colloquia series, look here:
http://cms.mit.edu/events/colloquiaforums.php


WWE Superstar and Harvard Alumni Chris Nowinski™ will be speaking to MIT students on Wednesday May 9. In class, Nowinski will be talking the crossover between wrestling and academics, and will focus on his experiences in and out of the WWE ring. Nowinksi recently made headlines with his book, Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis from the NFL to Youth Leagues. The book has fostered a close look at how the NFL and youth football leagues handle the consequences of multiple concussions and has been the catalyst for investigative coverage on the issue in national publications such as the New York Times, ESPN and Sports Illustrated.

Ford's class, entitled Topics in Comparative Media, focuses on the history of American professional wrestling and its place in popular culture. Ford will graduate in June with a Master's degree from the Comparative Media Studies department. While at MIT, he has worked as a media analyst for the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, located at http://www.convergencecutlure.org.


The students in the class participate in a public class blog, which can be found at http://mitcmsprowrestling.blogspot.com. More information on the Comparative Media Studies program can be found at http://cms.mit.edu.

For more information on these events, contact the MIT Comparative Media Studies program at cms@mit.edu


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