Sally Marks

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:

• The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918–1933 (Macmillan, 1976)^[5]
• Innocent Abroad: Belgium at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (University of North Carolina Press, 1981)^[6]
• The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: An International History of the World, 1914–1945 (Arnold, 2002)^[7]
• Paul Hymans: Belgium (Makers of the Modern World: The Peace Conferences of 1919–23 and Their Aftermath, Haus Publishing, 2010)^[8]