Sally Marks | |
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Born | New Haven, Connecticut, United States | January 18, 1931
Died | January 13, 2018 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States | (aged 86)
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Wellesley College, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, London School of Economics |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Rhode Island College |
Sally J. Marks (January 18, 1931 – January 14, 2018) was an American historian and author specialising in the field of post-First World War diplomatic history.
Marks was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduation from Wellesley College, she worked for the US Department of Defense. Marks received a master's degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, before doing a PhD in the United Kingdom at the London School of Economics.[1]
Marks lectured in history at Rhode Island College, receiving the Mary Tucker Thorp College Professorship in 1983.[2] Her research during the 1970s focused on then-newly opened archives of diplomatic correspondence from the period during and immediately after the First World War. Her discoveries in these archives cast doubt on the then-popular viewpoint advocated by John Maynard Keynes that the Versailles treaty had been excessively punitive. In 1988 she took early retirement from teaching at the college to focus full-time on research. From the 1990s onwards Marks suffered from myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, and in later life from poor eyesight.[1]
Historian William R. Keylor of Boston University said of her work that it had "...precipitated what might be called the post-Keynesian version of the economic portion of the peace settlement of 1919 that has won widespread acceptance in the profession".[3]
Marks received the George Louis Beer Prize for her 1981 book Innocent Abroad: Belgium at the Paris Peace Conference.[4] She also received the Phi Alpha Theta senior scholar award, as well as fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.[1]
Marks was the author of books including: