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.

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” […]
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” […]
I was reading a 1937 essay in which the author made casual mention of the problem of “morganatic marriage.” I’d never heard this term before.  I figured it might be […]
The “Defense of Marriage Act” is going to get a Supreme Court hearing soon, and in Maryland, same-sex marriage is being put to a referendum on November 6. There is […]
Dear Lover or Mistress: Let’s face it.  No one’s making chicken soup for your cheating soul. You’re not well-liked. If you’re a public figure and you get caught, pundits will […]
The Jokers to the Right in my title don’t require further introduction.  They’re the social conservatives who belittle rape in their anti-abortion zealotry, believe that the control and suppression of […]
I’ve just discovered a wonderful, Onion-worthy site for much-needed if wicked comic relief. Although I’m sorry to report that it’s not a parody site but one compiled from the real […]