Pamela Haag

Pamela Haag is an American writer and historian.

Education Haag received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 1995, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College, where she graduated with Highest Honors. She also earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in 2008. She has held numerous fellowships, including a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and postdoctoral positions at both Brown and Rutgers universities.

Career Haag’s essays, books, and opinion address a broad range of topics.

Her first book was a scholarly monograph, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Cornell University Press, 1999). It discusses the "transition from classic to modern liberalism, and the cultural emergence of a concept of a right to privacy and sexual liberty, decades before the concept became legally prominent in the late 1900s".

Haag was the Director of Research for the AAUW Educational Foundation for five years and, while there, published research on girls' insights about their challenges in school life, called "Voices of a Generation" (Marlowe, 2000).

The Gunning of America was praised as "beautifully composed", "brilliant", "remarkable", and "masterful" in reviews, including The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Review of Books, Maclean's, Time, and others. It received a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

The Gunning of America was named a best book of 2016 by Kirkus Reviews, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and an outstanding academic title by Choice. It was excerpted in The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Salon.

Haag has also published in places such as: The American Scholar, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, Huffington Post, Ms., The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Post, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Antioch Review, New Haven Review, and The Times (London), as well as peer-reviewed academic journals. Haag was also a regular columnist in 2012 and 2013 at Big Think.

Selected works

Books Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) Voices of a Generation: Girls Talk about Their Lives Today (Marlowe: 2000) Marriage Confidential (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). The Gunning of America (Basic Books, 2016) Revise: The Scholar-Writer's Essential Guide to Tweaking, Editing, and Perfecting Your Manuscript (Yale University Press 2021)