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Dr. Whitney Shylee May

  • Assoc Professor of Instruction - English
Portrait of Dr. Whitney Shylee May

Biography and education

Whitney S. May, Ph.D., is an associate professor of instruction for the Department of English at Texas State University. She received her B.A. in English and M.A. in Literature from Texas State University and her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas. Her primary research interests include the Gothic and nineteenth-century horror literature, as well as depictions of the carnivalesque in horror fiction and in popular culture. Her recent work includes the upcoming monograph The Circus Clown in American Capitalist Folklore (Bloomsbury Academic, 2027) and the edited collection Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King's IT (University Press of Mississippi, 2022). She has published chapters in: Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future (McFarland, 2023) and Displaced: Literature of Indigeneity, Migration, and Trauma (Routledge, 2020).

Other work has appeared in PopMatters, Children's Literature, Gothic Studies, Supernatural Studies, The Conversation, and The Edgar Allan Poe Review.
  • May, W. S. (n.d.). The Circus Clown in American Capitalist Folklore: Pennywise and Pound Foolish. London, The United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • May, W. S. (2023, October 11). “Gol o Bolbol Go Viral: Iranian Protest Songs in the Age of Social Media.” PopMatters. Retrieved from https://www.popmatters.com/iranian-protest-anthems-social-media
  • May, W. S. (2023). “The Way the Cookie Doubles: Cripping the Cyber-Gothic of Black Mirror’s AI Tech.” In Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future (pp. 48–68). Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press. Retrieved from https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/humanity-in-a-black-mirror/
  • May, W. S. (2022). Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King’s IT. Jackson, Mississippi, United States: University Press of Mississippi. Retrieved from https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/E/Encountering-Pennywise
  • May, W. S. (2021). “Powers of Their Own Which Mere ‘Modernity’ Cannot Kill”:The Doppelgänger and Temporal Modernist Terror in Dracula. Gothic Studies, 23(1), 60–76. https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2021.0078
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  • Award / Honor Recipient: Nontenure-Line Faculty Workload Release, Texas State University. December 2022 - May 2024
  • Award / Honor Nominee: Best Edited Collection of 2022, Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association. November 2022
  • Award / Honor Nominee: Presidential Excellence Award, Texas State University Department of English. November 2021 - February 2022
  • Award / Honor Nominee: Judith Plotz Emerging Scholar Award, The Children's Literature Association. November 2021
  1. Editor

    Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric

  2. Reviewer / Referee

    Gothic Studies

  3. University Mentor

    Bobcat Bond

  4. Other

    Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts

  5. Other

    Texas State Anime Club

  6. Other

    Summoners of Texas State

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