About

My name is Pamela Miriam Shuggi. I am a linguist and author.

I have studied five languages: Arabic, English, Spanish, French and Italian. I love all my languages; each has a beautiful personality and literature all its own. As Professor Christian Delacampagne told me when I enjoyed reading Eugène Ionesco’s Le roi se meurt, “La première fonction de la littérature est de faire plaisir.” (“The first function of literature is to give pleasure.”) Of course there are the underlying lessons and greater connections we take away after the last page has been turned…

Spanish and French are my working languages. English is my mother tongue since emigrating to the United States from Cairo, Egypt with my family at the tender age of four.

I have twenty years of translation experience and eighteen years of teaching experience, mostly at the college level.

I started this website, A Reader’s Story, in 2017 as a reflection on my experience, both personally and professionally, as a student of the arts and humanities.

I graduated with my MA-PhD in Spanish Literature in 2010 from the Johns Hopkins University. My dissertation focused on the appearance of the aporia of time as manifested in the poetic phrase, “la negra espalda del tiempo” (the black spine of time) in the first twelve novels of Javier Marías. In 2009 I was awarded a grant to attend the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College. I graduated with my BA in International Studies and Romance Languages in 2003, also from Johns Hopkins. My Senior Thesis was titled “Unified Europe’s Linguistic Experience.” In 2002 I was awarded the Severn Teackle Wallis Memorial Prize for Writing.

In 2020 I earned my 240-hour Yoga Teaching Certification. In addition to being a yogini, I am also a cat mom and avid knitter. I knit for the charity, Warm Up America!

Please do not hesitate to leave feedback or suggestions for new material in the Contact section. These will be emailed to me and I answer each one.