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.

A reader in his late 20s writes to me and poses this not-uncommon dilemma. The reader does not like his close friend’s fiancée. At all. He worries that his friend […]
I’m going to write the unpopular thing and go Tough Love on my own people.  A modest proposal: Women need to act like the successful grown-ups that they are or […]
In September of 1965, Life magazine ran a piece on medicine’s “astonishing” and “audacious experiments” that might even promise a “kind of immortality.” The first article dealt with reproduction. The […]
I was touring a tony private school the other day and came home impressed but disquieted.  The teachers and parents were welcoming, genuinely pleasant and unfailingly polite, yet I felt […]
One of the sadder but less noted aspects of this lurid Petraeus business is that not only did he cheapen his public service legacy and career with this affair, Paula […]
As lawyers say, exceptional cases make bad law. The director of the CIA having an affair in which, at best, he lacked the wherewithal to keep the secret secret (isn’t […]
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it This is the ponderous epigraph of many a high school history term paper. And it’s wrong. Like as not, we’re “doomed” […]