Marci Sortor presently serves as Vice President for Institutional Planning. She has been a member of the department of history at Grinnell College since 1989. In 2002, she joined the Office of the Dean of the College, serving as associate dean. She continues to serve as associate dean in the capacities of helping to implement the Expanding Knowledge Initiative of the Strategic Plan and in guiding the development of a master plan for Burling Library.

As Associate Professor of History at Grinnell College, she has taught courses on Europe in the Middle Ages and early modern period, including seminars on rebellion and cities in pre-industrial Europe, interdisciplinary team-taught courses on "Medieval and Renaissance Culture" and "Conceptions of Space and Place in Europe and the Mediterranean"; Grinnell-in-London courses on rural life in medieval England, monasticism, and Robin Hood (and real-life English outlaws); and first-year Tutorials on epidemic disease in pre-industrial Europe and the Renaissance. As chair of the department, she guided the NEH-funded development of a new introduction to the study of history: "Cultural Encounters."

Marci Sortor pursued the PhD at the University of California, San Diego, where she studied with Stanley Chodorow and David Ringrose. She held a Teaching and Research Fellowship at Stanford University from 1987 to 1989. She has published articles on immigration, market networks, and proto-industrialization in medieval Flanders and France. She has also co-edited with Stanley Chodorow two editions of a reader on the social history of Europe before 1700.