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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.
What Do You Know, Feminism Really DOES Work
A fascinating study that is monumental in its research scope and ambitions is published in the fall American Political Science Review, the flagship scholarly journal for the discipline.  Researchers S. […]
Pointlessly Genderized Item of the Week
This one comes courtesy of a dear friend, who monitors the superfluous, hyper-genderizing of merchandise. At just the moment when gender roles for many of us have never been more […]
Testing the Bottom of our Humanity
Market reports sometimes use the phrase “testing the bottom.” It’s when a market flirts with a new low, below which it will not fall. The phrase also applies to the […]
“Cool” in the Time of Twitter
With a tween in the house I’ve rediscovered the ruthless economy of cool. I’ve remembered that cool is as unforgiving of bad timing as the stock market. One minute the […]
Extract Head from Vagina
The multicultural joke goes like this:  The Lone Ranger and Tonto find themselves in a tough spot, surrounded by hostile Native Americans. “We’d better get out of here,” the Lone […]
The Athlete Mixed Marriage
“What are you thinking?” is a booby-trapped marriage question. I know this, but I can’t always resist its shiny lure.   My husband John and I were on a long […]
“Legitimate” Rape
Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin’s comments about victims of “legitimate rape” caused a 30-email pile-up in my Inbox yesterday, from political and women’s organizations. The GOP would like you to […]