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.

I recently participated in a “relationship summit” on break ups. I don’t know how wise or helpful I was. When it comes to break-up and heartache recovery, I’m not sure […]
Mistresses and Lovers for Dummies, Rule #3:   If you want an open marriage, then make sure to upload the most updated, de-bugged version of the software, and not the 1970s […]
A man and woman have been married for over a decade. The wife seems happy, and she feels happy, or happy enough, in her marriage. The husband seems happy. He […]
In my experience it’s easier to change a home design than to change your heart, or your feelings. Take the case of “staying together for the children,” a familiar marital […]
When did the world turn so “inappropriate?” It seems to be getting more so by the year.  Inappropriate’s already appeared 26,200,000 times in 2011 on Google-indexed material. In 2010, it […]
The United States is following its peer nations in Western Europe and is projected to become a majority unmarried and “post-marriage” nation within the decade, according to research released this […]
The Tahirih Justice Center is one of the U.S.’s foremost legal defense organizations for immigrant women and girls fleeing human rights abuses such as domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking, […]