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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.
THE RELATIONSHIP BUCKET LIST
There’s a booming genre in wee books of things to see or do “before you die.” I don’t read these books, but Australian hospice nurse Bronnie Ware’s recently-published book, The […]
IN PRAISE OF MY DUMB-AS-DIRT, STUPID PHONE
[Readers: here’s a largely non-relationship column, for a change of pace…] My cell phone is an idiot. It’s a straight-up, dingbat dumb-ass. It can’t do anything, except make phone calls, […]
Death by a Thousand Nags
You’ve forgiven an affair. You’ve put up with violations of the marriage’s budget. You’ve been bored, irked, and ignored. But if he mentions picking up a goddamned wet towel off […]
“Same Bed, Different Dreams”
A man and woman have been married for over a decade. The wife seems happy, and she feels happy, or happy enough, in her marriage. The husband seems happy. He […]
The Neighbor Break-Up
I just learned that our neighbors are moving, to another state. My heart broke a little when I heard this. They’re moving so that the mom can take a better […]
Mistresses and Lovers for Dummies
One of the themes in my book that elicited attention was my “new monogamy” section, where I explore ethically non-monogamous marriages, and the gray zone of don’t ask, don’t tell […]