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Marcia Deborah Pally (born March 1, 1951) is a professor at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Early life and education
Pally was raised in Elmhurst, Queens. She received her early education at the Solomon Schechter School of Queens,. She earned a B.Sc. in Human Ecology from Cornell University in 1971, and an  M.F.A. in choreography from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1995, Pally earned a doctorate (Ed.D.) from New York University.

Early career
Following her career as a dancer and choreographer,  Pally worked as a columnist, and a dance and film critic in Europe and the United States, and as a prominent activist for gay and lesbian rights,  and an advocate for women's rights and  freedom of expression.

In 1985, Pally became one of the founders, and original board members of GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, an organization formed to protest against homophobic coverage of AIDS in the media, and served as acting chair. Pally's tenure as acting chair was contentious, and led to the resignation of several board members, as well as to criticism of Pally's "supposed foray into heterosexuality", and as an assertion that she was unsuitable to hold a position of leadership in the organization due to her alleged refusal to identify as a lesbian. Pally categorically denied the allegations, describing them as "ludicrous"

In 1992, Pally founded the advocacy group Feminists for Free Expression, and served as president of the organization. During that period, Pally published two books on censorship: Sense and Censorship: The Vanity of the Bonfires, and Sex & Sensibility: Reflections on Forbidden Mirrors and the Will to Censor.

After earning a doctorate (Ed.D.) from New York University in 1995, Pally embarked upon an academic career.

Academic Career
Professor Marcia Pally teaches at New York University (adjunct), at Fordham University, and is a regular guest professor at the Theology Faculty of Humboldt University zu Berlin. Her most recent books are Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality (Eerdmans, 2016) and The New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good (in German: Die neuen Evangelikalen: Freiheitsgewinne durch fromme Politik)..

Commonwealth and Covenant has been selected by the United Nations Committee on Education for Justice “to be distributed in their materials to “educators, academics, policy-makers, parents, students, teacher training institutes, and curriculum developers throughout the world” and it was nominated for a Grawemeyer Award in religion.

Pally's research interests include religion, culture, and politics as well as the intersection of language and culture. During the 1990s, she wrote in critique of government censorship in such works as Sense and Censorship, and Sex & Sensibility: Reflections on Forbidden Mirrors and the Will to Censor but has stepped away from legal questions in recent years.

Pally spoke at the World Economic Forum in 2010 and has been awarded the prestigious Mercator Guest Professorship (German Research Foundation) as well as grants from the German Academic Exchange Service, from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Telos/Paul Piccone Institute. In addition, she is the co-recipient of a German Research Foundation grant to compare the political ethics and activism of American and German evangelicals, the only study of its kind.

In 2007 and 2010, she was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin).

Author
In addition to her academic work, Prof. Pally has been a columnist in the U.S. and Europe for over 30 years, writing for Religion and Ethics, Commonweal, and Religion News Service, among other periodicals. She has published one opinion piece in The New York Times,, and one in The Washington Post, two comments in The Guardian, and columns in Internationale Politik (German Council on Foreign Relations), Foreign Policy, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tageszeitung, Berliner Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Penthouse, The Advocate, The New York Native, The Village Voice, The Nation, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.

Marcia Pally has given lectures at many universities and professional associations, among them Oxford, The University of Chicago, Harvard, Columbia University, Telos Institute, Humboldt University (Berlin), The Free University-Berlin, The University of Zurich, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Ruhr University-Bochum, Bielefeld University, The Cato Institute, the Aspen Institute-Berlin.

In the field of language acquisition, Pally was the editor of Sustained Content-Based Teaching in Academic ESL/EFL, for which she also wrote several chapters. She is the author of Screening English: Studying Movies for Reading, Writing, and Critical Thinking (1997, Pearson Press). Other articles in that field have appeared in Language and Education, the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Journal of Second Language Writing, and Journal of Basic Writing.