Pamela Haag
Essayist
Recent Activity
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I’ve always suspected, to paraphrase an adage from evolutionary science, that the marriage replicates the wedding. The wedding’s style is a germinal expression of the marriage to come, its strengths, vulnerabilities, and dreams. Looking back, many of my marriage’s resources and weaknesses were ... Read More
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A friend recently asked me: why has public opinion on same-sex marriage “evolved,” in Obama’s coinage, while public opinion on abortion grinds itself deeper into a rut? It’s an interesting question. Americans across demographic groups have grown steadily more tolerant of same-sex marriage (or ... Read More
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Here are hypotheses 10 through 18 on how social media might change your love life. Click here for Part 1… ASSORTATIVE MATING ON STEROIDS Like marries like today. “ Assortative mating” is one of the major marriage trends of the last 60 years. We marry people who are more like us in ... Read More
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So, I guess Facebook is here to stay. In honor of its over-subscribed IPO, I’m brainstorming about how social media might be existentially changing our romantic lives and intimacy. Here’s the first installment. I’ll post part 2 Wednesday. JEALOUSY LOOMS LARGER Romance might get ... Read More
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What could be better than starting your morning, visiting your online haunts, and being confronted, bleary-eyed, with a picture of a blonde woman in a catsuit having her breast suckled by an almost 4-year old boy standing on a chair and staring into the camera, under the Mothers-Fighting-Mothers ... Read More
About Pamela Haag
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.