Justine Pas

Professor, English

McCluer Hall 110
(636) 949-46770
jpas@lindenwood.edu

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’ 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’s 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

• “The Politics of Relay Translation and Language Hierarchies: The Case of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.” Translation and the Intersection of Texts, Contexts, and Politics, ed. Mohammed Albakry. Palgrave MacMillan, 2017.
• “Foreword.” We Who Lived: Two Teenagers in World War II Poland. By Hava Bromberg Ben-Zvi. McFarland Books, 2017.
• “Feminist Lives in Translation: The Role of English in the Global Feminisms Project“ with Magdalena Zaborowska. In Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives, eds. Olga Castro and Ergun Emek. Routledge, 2017.
• “Eva Hoffman.” Biographical essay in Critical Survey of American Literature. Salem Press, 2016.
• Book review of Phillip F. Gura’s Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (2013), American Studies, 1 (2014).
• Review article of Christopher Douglas’s A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism (2009), Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 10.2(Fall 2013).
• “Language and belonging in the Polish translation of Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation” Translation Studies 1(2013)
• “Images of Polish Jewish Literature” book review of Hava Bromberg Ben-Zvi’s Portraits in Literature: The Jews of Poland, H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences May, 2012
• “Writing American Literature in Polish: Post-Holocaust Jewish Identities in Jadwiga Maurer’s Short Stories” The Journal of Jewish Identities2(2010)
• “Global Feminisms and the Polish ‘Woman’: Reading Popular Culture Representations through Stories of Activism since 1989" with Magdalena Zaborowska, Kritika Kultura 16(2011)
• “Recasting Global Feminisms: Towards a Comparative Historical Approach to Feminist Scholarship and Women’s Activism” with Jayati Lal, Kristin McGuire, Abigail J. Stewart, and Magdalena Zaborowska, Feminist Studies 36(2010)