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.

You spend a lot of time talking about sharing and alternatives to ownership when your child’s in preschool. In the morning story circle you don’t want to be an avaricious, […]
America’s nuclear waste is all dressed up in dry cask storage, with nowhere to go. In 1987, the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was designated as a “deep geologic dispersal” site for […]
Cruelty preoccupies me. I find that stories of cruelty stay with me, hauntingly, and infiltrate deeply. I cannot conceive of it in its most basic elements, the physical act of […]
It’s hard to absorb and write about stories that break your heart. When I saw the headline about Rehtaeh Parsons, who was gang-raped when she was 15 and committed suicide […]
The hedgehog probes deeply and narrowly; the fox skims lightly and broadly.
While I was writing a column on Victoria’s Secret and their “Bright Young Things” marketing campaign, I learned in the same set of articles about a new worry among adolescent […]
I think a little perspective is order. The incendiary advice of Susan Patton ‘77, a Princeton alumna, that Princeton women find husbands while at college and marry early, has crashed […]