She is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

[1] She specializes in nineteenth-century British and French literature and culture, and teaches courses on the 19th-century novel in England and France, particularly in relation to the history of urbanism and architecture; gender and sexuality studies; narrative theory; and 19th-century theater and performance.

[1][4] Marcus is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999), which received an honorable mention for the MLA Scaglione Prize for best book in comparative literature, and Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: 2007).

[1] With Stephen Best, she edited a special issue of Representations on "The Way We Read Now" that has been important within the growing field, in literary criticism and cultural studies, of postcritique.

[5] Before joining Columbia in 2003, Marcus taught and received tenure at the University of California, Berkeley.