College of Arts and Humanities
Justine Pas
Justine Pas
Professor, English
McCluer Hall 110
(636) 949-46770
[email protected]
Biographical Information
Dr. Pas emigrated from Poland and earned high school and college degrees in Southern California. While earning a Master of Arts degree in American studies at California State University, Fullerton, she also studied applied linguistics to better understand how non-native English speakers acquire linguistic proficiency and how structural and cultural factors including, but not limited to, race, gender, ethnicity, and age influence these speakers鈥� access to language proficiency.
Inspired by her own experience of linguistic and cultural displacement, Pas focused her doctoral studies at the University of Michigan on ethnic and immigrant literatures. While pursuing a Ph.D. in American Culture with a concentration in literary studies, she also studied Jewish American history and literature. Pas also spent several years studying Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European Jewish diaspora, to more fully appreciate the cultural and linguistic experiences of Jewish immigrants who made their lives in the U.S. during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her doctoral dissertation examined autobiographical accounts of Holocaust survivors who wrote about their unimaginable ordeals in English and from the distance and perspective of their immigrant homes in America. She鈥檚 passionate about teaching and sees her research as integral to bringing real-world experience into the classroom.
Academic & Research Interests
- Applied linguistics
- U.S. immigrant and ethnic literatures
- History and literature of the Holocaust
- Life writing
- Translation theory and practice
Courses Taught
Dr. Pas has taught the following courses:
- Academic Writing
- American Literature
- Comparative Literature
- Ethnic Literature
- Immigrant Literature
- Literary Translation
- Representations of the Holocaust
- Sociolinguistics
- World Literature
Publications
- 鈥淭he Politics of Relay Translation and Language Hierarchies: The Case of Stanislaw Lem鈥檚 Solaris.鈥� Translation and the Intersection of Texts, Contexts, and Politics, ed. Mohammed Albakry. Palgrave MacMillan, 2017.
- 鈥淔辞谤别飞辞谤诲.鈥� We Who Lived: Two Teenagers in World War II Poland. By Hava Bromberg Ben-Zvi. McFarland Books, 2017.
- 鈥淔eminist Lives in Translation: The Role of English in the Global Feminisms Project鈥� with Magdalena Zaborowska. In Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives, eds. Olga Castro and Ergun Emek. Routledge, 2017.
- 鈥淓va Hoffman.鈥� Biographical essay in Critical Survey of American Literature. Salem Press, 2016.
- Book review of Phillip F. Gura鈥檚 Truth鈥檚 Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (2013), American Studies, 1 (2014).
- Review article of Christopher Douglas鈥檚 A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (2009), Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 10.2(Fall 2013).
- 鈥淟anguage and belonging in the Polish translation of Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation鈥� Translation Studies 1(2013)
- 鈥淚mages of Polish Jewish Literature鈥� book review of Hava Bromberg Ben-Zvi鈥檚 Portraits in Literature: The Jews of Poland, H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences May, 2012
- 鈥淲riting American Literature in Polish: Post-Holocaust Jewish Identities in Jadwiga Maurer鈥檚 Short Stories鈥� The Journal of Jewish Identities2(2010)
- 鈥淕lobal Feminisms and the Polish 鈥榃oman鈥�: Reading Popular Culture Representations through Stories of Activism since 1989″ with Magdalena Zaborowska, Kritika Kultura 16(2011)
- 鈥淩ecasting Global Feminisms: Towards a Comparative Historical Approach to Feminist Scholarship and Women鈥檚 Activism鈥� with Jayati Lal, Kristin McGuire, Abigail J. Stewart, and Magdalena Zaborowska, Feminist Studies 36(2010)