Marshall earned her BA at Rutgers, and her MA and PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation was titled “Sisters in Crime: Black Femininity, Law, and Literature in American Culture.” Marshall developed and taught over a half dozen courses at California State University at Long Beach, the University of Redlands, and the University of California, Los Angeles, some of which included “Gender, Crime, and American Prisons,” “Introduction to LGBT Studies,” and “Black Women Writers and the 1960s.” Marshall’s research interests include African-American literature, critical race feminism, queer ethnic studies, and law and popular culture. She has published the essay