Pamela Haag

Pamela Haag

Essayist

Pamela Haag’s work spans a wide, and unusual, spectrum, all the way from academic scholarship to memoir. Thematically, it has consistently focused on women's issues, feminism, and American culture, but she’s also written on topics as eclectic as the effort to rebuild the lower Manhattan subway lines after 9/11, 24-hour sports radio talk shows, and the experience of class mobility.

Haag earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1995, after graduating with Highest Honors from Swarthmore College. She’s held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and post-doctoral fellowships at both Brown and Rutgers University. As an academic she published scholarly articles and a first book, based on dissertation work, with Cornell University Press in 1999.

She became the Director of Research for the AAUW Educational Foundation, a nationalnonprofit based in Washington, DC, that advocates for girls and women. In that capacity she wrote and edited several pieces of research and was the media spokesperson for the research.
In 2002, Haag became a speechwriter on issues of public transit and transit-oriented development for the secretary of the Federal Transit Administration and, occasionally, the Secretary of Transportation.

Since 2004, she has been publishing personal and opinion essays in a variety of venues, including National Public Radio, the American Scholar, the Christian Science Monitor, Ms. magazine, the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Michigan Quarterly Review, New Haven Review, the Antioch Review and carte blanche. Haag earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in 2008, where she won the Chris White award for best essay, and was also a prizewinner in the Atlantic’s 2008 national nonfiction contest.

Haag's latest book, Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules, released by HarperCollins in May of 2011, draws on all of these strands of Haag’s unique professional biography to create almost a new genre, a weave of academic expertise, cultural history, creativenonfiction, memoir, storytelling, interviews, and commentary.

Is it my cranky imagination or does Valentine’s Day become more of a big deal every year? All of the second-tier holidays seem to have gotten elevated in the last […]
Like the rest of the country, feminism has undergone one percent-ification.  The most discussed books on women’s lives speak to privileged women while usually assuming, if only by default, to […]
“Every day I live in mortal fear of offending someone.”  An old friend of mine tells me this over dinner. He shouldn’t have to be afraid. He’s not bigoted or […]
When the nurse footprinted my son at birth, she declared, “his foot almost doesn’t fit in the box” on her special Baby Footprint Form (nurses and doctors like things to fit […]
I want to think about garbage today. Driving home from the store, I made an informal census of the garbage by the side of the road and in the green […]
Pew released an interesting survey today on millennial women’s and men’s perceptions of the workplace. It makes me wonder about the role of surveys in shaping (rather than simply recording) […]
Answer: Hormones. That’s true, but not the whole predicament. Middle school has issues. The problem is often folded into a larger, if illusory, “problem” of the U.S. public school system […]
I loathe Amazon’s book business for a few reasons, but one of the deepest is its Vine program that offers free books to customers who are prolific in their opinions. […]
“If you want to go to a top-tier school…;” It’s a “lower-tier school, but good…” In conversations about college, you often hear rankings-focused comments. It’s difficult to remember the time […]
I was in a creative nonfiction program some years ago, and as part of the program, students would visit with culture magazine editors in New York. An editor explained to […]
For younger Americans, the President might very well be most vividly remembered for the way he died.
If you filled out a form today, you were probably asked your “gender.” I’m always tempted to answer “mannish,” or “girlie.” This isn’t what the form wants to know. Frequently […]
Well, okay, maybe you are dumb, drunk, vapid, and horny (oh, and also, lazy and narcissistic—see Time). You’re young, after all. In case you’ve not seen them, some Colorado ads […]
Francis Fukuyama famously wrote in a 1992 book that we’d reached “The End of History.” He meant that the major ideological conflict of the 20th century, between Communism and democracy, […]
Comes a time when you realize, you’re basically a straight-up Luddite, or at best the loyal opposition to the social media age, and you might as well embrace that and […]
Kudos to the ever-reasonable Ruth Marcus, who defends her friend Emily Yoffe, who wrote what seems on the deconstructed face of things to be banal advice: young women are safer […]
It takes a fair amount to get my blood boiling at 5:21 a.m., but an NPR Morning Edition interview with a new savior of investigative journalism, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, […]
I could also title this column, Middle School: The Everlasting Black Hole of Education. I’m not an education expert, only a parent, but the trouble with middle school is easily […]
For the reader, art connoisseur, music fan, or student, this is a “money for nothing and your chicks for free” kind of world (Google the lyrics if you’re too young […]
Why are all the radicals on the right today? My argument is that we have two problems in Washington: One is hyperpartisanship, as a Washington Post article details. Because of […]