Faculty Profile for Dr. Whitney Shylee May

profile photo for Dr. Whitney Shylee May
Dr. Whitney Shylee May
Assoc Professor of Instruction — English
LAMP 309B
phone: (512) 245-6214
Scholarly/Creative Work
Awards
Service

Biography Section

Biography and Education

 Whitney S. May, Ph.D., is an associate professor of instruction for the Department of English at Texas State University. 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 edited collection Encountering Pennywise: Critical Perspectives on Stephen King's IT (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) and chapters in: Humanity in a Black Mirror: Essays on Posthuman Fantasies in a Technological Near Future (McFarland, 2023), Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous: Gods and Monsters (Lexington Books, 2021), and Displaced: Literature of Indigeneity, Migration, and Trauma (Routledge, 2020).

Other recent work has been published in PopMatters, Children's Literature, Gothic Studies, Supernatural Studies, and The Edgar Allan Poe Review.

Selected Scholarly/Creative Work

  • 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
  • May, W. S. (2021). “Topophilic Perversions: Spectral Blackface and Fetishizing Sites of Monstrosity in American Dark Tourism.” In Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous: Gods and Monsters (pp. 157–167). Lanham, Maryland, United States: Lexington Books.

Selected Awards

  • 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

Selected Service Activities

University Mentor
Bobcat Bond
September 2016-May 2024
University Mentor
Foster Care Alumni Creating Educational Success
October 1, 2015-May 2024
Advisory Board Member: Adjunct Representative
Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts
October 2018-October 2022
Faculty Sponsor
Texas State Anime Club
October 2019-December 2020
Faculty Sponsor
Summoners of Texas State
September 2017-May 2019