Marjorie Siegel is Professor Emerita of Literacy Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she Co-Directed the Literacy Specialist Program and taught courses on literacy theory, research, and pedagogy. Her scholarship impacted the changing theories of literacy (multimodal, disciplinary, critical) through three lines of inquiry: the semiotics of multimodality; literacies of knowing and learning mathematics; and entanglements of power and pedagogy in multimodal performances. She led the way expanding the field of reading by researching, writing, and teaching about semiotics and transmediation. She is the co-author of Reading Counts: Rethinking the Role of Reading in Mathematics Classrooms (Teachers College Press), and Critical Thinking: A Semiotic Perspective (NCTE).

A Language Arts (1984) research review impactfully argues her theoretical perspective and its influence of the field. Her research was supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and was published in numerous journals, including Reading Research Quarterly, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, and Language Arts, and handbooks and edited volumes of research on reading and literacy. She taught reading in Madison, Wisconsin, received an Ed.D. in Reading Education from Indiana University-Bloomington (1984), and taught at the University of Utah and University of Rochester (NY) before joining the Teachers College faculty in 1993.

Professor Siegel was elected to the Board of Directors of the Literacy Research Association and served on the editorial boards of the top research and practitioner journals in the field.