Her research has primarily involved Japanese culture and politics and generally been focused on the question of modernity.
Her only book, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan, published by University of Chicago Press in 1995, traces the experience of modern Japanese culture during its emergence alongside the formation of the Japanese nation-state to recent anxieties about the possible or potential loss of national identity.
Ivy joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1997 and has taught courses on contemporary Japanese aesthetics, politics, and technology, as well as on modern and critical theory of anthropology.
She lives in New York City with her husband John Pemberton, also an associate professor of anthropology at Columbia, and their daughter Alice Ivy-Pemberton.
Both professors are affiliated with the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Ivy also serves on the Editorial Committee of the academic journal Public Culture.
"The Art of Cute Little Things: Nara Yoshitomo's Parapolitics," in Mechademia (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press) Ivy, Marilyn.
by Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press) Ivy, Marilyn.
"Mourning the Japanese Thing," in Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory of the End of the Century.
In Culture and Contexture: Readings in Anthropology and Literary Study, edited by E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck, pages 296–322.