Classic cinema, Orson Welles and the origins of "truthiness" in performance, transindigenous adaptations of Shakespeare, and performing gendered and racialized sexualities from Shakespeare to Hollywood.
Marguerite joined CHSS in 2020 from her position as the Director of the Master's program in English & humanities at Marymount University, where she was a former chair of Literature and Languages and chair of the university’s SACSCOC reaccreditation committee. Over the course of her career she has worked with a range of organizations in the D.C. metropolitan area to encourage higher education partnerships with the community, to facilitate life-long learning and experiential education, and to ensure institutional commitments to equity and inclusion through high school and community college pathway agreements and diversity recruitment initiatives.
Her book Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective (Southern Illinois UP, 2009) analyzes Welles' unfinished early films in the context of his concurrent performances on stage and radio, examining in particular his strategic use of Shakespeare, his explorations of American cultural identities, and his indebtedness to transcultural collaborations.
In Progress:
Orson Welles, Macbeth, and Africa: Collaborative Genius in the Age of Segregation, a study of the national road tour of the 1936 black-cast Federal Theater Project Macbeth.
Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective. Southern Illinois UP, 2009.
“Orson Welles” in Great Shakespeareans: (Volume XV) Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, Zeffirelli. Mark Thornton Burnett, Marguerite Rippy, and Ramona Wray. Bloomsbury 2013. 7-53
“The Death of the Auteur: Orson Welles, Asadata Dafora, and the 1936 Macbeth.” Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts. Indiana UP, 2018.
“More Moor, Less Venice: Africa Talks Back to Othello in Not Now, Sweet Desdemona and Iago” Shakespeare en devenir 12 (2017). Online.
“Welles ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth: Neither Vodou nor Welles?” Shakespeare Bulletin 32 (Winter 2014): 687-92.
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2019, book project: Orson Welles, Macbeth, and Africa: Collaborative Genius in the Age of Segregation.
Text and Academic Authors Association Publication Grant, 2008.
Mednick Grant, Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, 2007.
National Endowment for the Humanities, “We the People” American History Summer Stipend, 2004.
Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship for Travel & Research, Lilly Library, 2001, 2006.
Marshall Fishwick Travel Grant, Popular Culture Association, 2004.
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Ph.D. in English and American Literature, 1999
Minor: Performance Studies
Dissertation: “Visual Differences: Images of Miscegenation in Twentieth-Century Performance”
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
M.A. in English and American Literature, 1990
Brown University, Providence, RI
B.A. with honors in English and American Literature, 1989
Orson Welles’ Other Side of the Wind and Shakespeare, Shakespeare Association of America, 2019.
Othello’s Revenge: Africa Strikes Back in C. Bernard Jackson’s Iago (1979), Comparative Drama Conference, 2018.
Woodstock Welles Creative Arts Festival keynote speaker, 2016 (by invitation).
Contested American Identities: The 1936 “Voodoo” Macbeth and the Texas Centennial, American Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2016.
Transnational Europe in Performance: A Convergence of Continents in the 1936 ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth, MLA International Symposium, Dusseldorf, GER, 2016.
“The Fake News of Orson Welles: War of the Worlds at 80.” Interview by Peter Tonguette. Humanities (Fall 2018) 39.4.
“Monster’s Ball: Should We Stop Inviting Hollywood’s Worst to the Party?” Interview by E.A. Aymar. Washington Independent Review of Books 28 Dec 2018.
“Film? Study.” Interview by E.A. Aymar. Washington Independent Review of Books. 14 Sep 2017.
“An Interview with Marguerite Rippy.” Interview by Jake Hinson. Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource. 18 Oct 2009.