As the Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs Associate Professor of English, Marshall studies American fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research explores the genres writers are using to speculate about the human in a world of changing environments, technologies, and ways of being together. In her books and in the classroom, she works with the entwined histories of literature, science, and technology that inform the trenchant questions of the present.

"I look to American fiction to understand how the many systems that connect our world are experienced by individual minds," Marshall says. "Novels have a special power to speculate about possible futures, to show us how we tell stories about the past, and to help us understand what it feels like to be human in an era of great technological change."

Marshall also serves as associate dean of research and strategic initiatives in the College of Arts & Letters and directs the College's Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, which helps advance and promote faculty and student research and creative endeavors.

"Notre Dame is a place unique in American higher education, where a commitment to extraordinary research innovation doesn't just include the humanities and the liberal arts, but continues to be built on their foundation," she says. "It fills me with deep pride to share in our campus research mission as a literary scholar, and to work on its behalf for the College of Arts and Letters and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts. It has never been more crucial to draw on the liberal arts to address the most trenchant questions our society faces, and we must never tire in our curiosity or in our commitment."