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.

American politics are getting more Onion-ish. People are mistaking stories from the brilliant parodic newspaper The Onion for “real” news with what seems like growing frequency. Recently, Louisiana Rep. John […]
War is hell. The culture war is no exception—and the funny bone is usually the first casualty. The recent talk about abortion and contraception got me thinking, what would the […]
I’m a word nerd. My husband bought me a 20-volume unabridged Oxford English Dictionary as a Valentine’s Day present one year. It was the first Valentine’s gift that I took […]
This is a polemic:  Access to birth control isn’t really about my “health.” It’s not principally about the management of ovarian cysts or the regulation of periods. Birth control isn’t […]
Casablanca, kissing, the giddy exchange of bodily fluids, the pressing of the flesh—It’s all so 20th century. Today there doesn’t need to be sex in your sex anymore. The “virtual,” […]
The “slippery slope” is a popular argument in the same-sex marriage debate. Where do you draw the line, opponents argue? If you start allowing marriage between people of the same […]
Now this is what I call post-romantic. It begins with a fascinating vanguard of “neuromarketing” researchers. These scientist-marketers hook up subjects (consumers) to new biometric technologies such as EEG headsets […]