Skip to content

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.
Guest Thinkers
E-SPERM FOR SALE: MAN NOT INCLUDED
College in a Nutskull is a wickedly entertaining collection of bloopers from college students’ exam books. It includes this gem of unwitting brilliance about post-millennial marriage: “By being intelligent and […]
Guest Thinkers
E-SPERM FOR SALE: MAN NOT INCLUDED
College in a Nutskull is a wickedly entertaining collection of bloopers from college students’ exam books. It includes this gem of unwitting brilliance about post-millennial marriage: “By being intelligent and […]
Guest Thinkers
Signs of the Post-Romantic Times: Arranged Marriage Chic?
Americans are growing more interested in and perhaps enamored of matchmaking and arranged marriage, which used to call to mind Fiddler on the Roof or an expose on “primitive” custom. This tentative interest in arranged marriage in Western cultures co-exists with an international, thoroughly romantic, “love before marriage” trend, which suggests an amusing and fascinating cross-pollination.
Guest Thinkers
Does the Celebrity Break-Up Have Anything to Do With Our Own Marriages?
It’s hard to normalize the celebrity marriage and divorce for the rest of us.  After all, we’re highly unlikely to end up married to an immigrant ex-bodybuilder, mega-Hollywood action star turned Governor who impregnates a member of our full-time housekeeping staff. These divorces should be consigned to the marriage equivalent of a Special Victims Unit.