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.

Many years later it dawned on me that what I wanted to be when I was 14 was “erudite.” I should have known the word back then, as I had […]
NOTE:  I originally posted this column in 2012, after the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed a conviction based on the collection of a DNA sample from a suspect.  This case […]
My electric toothbrush kept me up half the night like a squalling newborn. The trouble began yesterday. My husband and I were sitting downstairs when we heard a thunderous rumbling […]
My electric toothbrush kept me up half the night like a squalling newborn. The trouble began yesterday. My husband and I were sitting downstairs when we heard a thunderous rumbling […]
The origin of Valentine’s Day has nothing to do with love and everything to do with “torturous martyrdom.” On second thought, perhaps the origin of Valentine’s Day has a great deal to do with love.
Nothing says I Love You like exsanguination, whipping, and the sweet nothing whispered in the ear of a mutual pledge not to machete each other to death. Or so an […]
My favorite Baltimorean iconoclast, filmmaker John Waters, had a wonderful line during a local NPR interview a few years ago. The topic had turned to same-sex marriage campaigns and Waters […]