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About Our Speaker
Susan L. Marquis, PhD, is the Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor and lecturer at Princeton’s School for Public and International Affairs. As faculty chair for the School’s undergraduate program, she focuses on effecting positive change in our communities through governments, nonprofits, philanthropy, and the private sector.
She has 27 years of senior academic, nonprofit research, consulting, and national security leadership and management experience, with demonstrated effectiveness in strengthening and transforming organizations operationally, financially, and in pursuit of their missions.
From 2008 to 2021, Marquis served as the inaugural Frank and Marcia Carlucci Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, taking on the additional role of Vice President, Innovation at the RAND Corporation in 2012. The school’s Community Partnership program establishes long-term partnerships with community members focused on finding and implementing community-driven solutions and bringing those affected by public policies into policymaking. Her efforts at the school reflect Pardee RAND’s emphasis on the need for systemic change to address long-term issues of equity and social justice.
She also served at the highest levels of the U.S. Navy as Assistant Deputy Chief of Naval Operations and later as acting Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, the first civilian to serve in this three-star, military position.
Marquis has been a thought leader with unusual breadth to include influential works, such as her books, Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces, and I Am Not A Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took on the Fast Food Giants and Won, which discusses the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fair Food Program as new models for agricultural labor and social justice movements. Her presentation will focus on the second of these publications. She is currently working on her next book, examining the role of faith-based organizations in positive social change in the United States.
Early in her career, Marquis managed and promoted Washington, D.C. punk bands and dj’d at the original 9:30 Club. She earned her Ph.D. and Master of Public Policy and International Affairs from Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs and her BA in History with Highest Honors from Rutgers College.
