Faculty and Staff Directory

Dr. MARGARET M. "PEGGY" GRIPSHOVER is a Professor of Geography in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Atmospheric Sciences (EEAS). She is a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, and joined the EEAS faculty in 2009. Prior to arriving in Bowling Green, she was on the faculty at Marshall University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Gripshover is the recipient of several prestigious teaching awards including the University of Tennessee Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the University of Tennessee National Alumni Association Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2019, she was the recipient of the Henry H. Douglas Distinguished Service Award, from the International Society for Landscape, Place and Material Culture, for her contributions in the areas of research, teaching, and service.

Dr. Gripshover’s teaching responsibilities include undergraduate and graduate courses in Honors World Regional Geography, Cultural Geography, Geography of Kentucky, Geography of Potent Potables, and Sustainable Cities. Her research is centered on the interplay between cultural, historical, and economic geography in the U.S. South (especially Kentucky), and the Midwest. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Tennessee, where she wrote her dissertation on the development and diffusion of the Tennessee Walking Horse. Dr. Gripshover has spent much of her life involved with horses—both on the ground and in the saddle---and has translated her lifelong love of horses into a career-long research agenda. She has presented and published works on the geographies of Walking Horses, Thoroughbreds, Saddlebreds, and mules. In 2014, she published, “Born to Run: Kentucky Derby Winners’ Foaling Locations in Kentucky: 1875-2013,” in FOCUS on Geography, in which she identified and mapped the specific locations in Kentucky where Derby winners were foaled. She is also engaged in research on baseball, patents and innovation, cultural landscapes, historic preservation, and the craft brewing industry.

Dr. Gripshover has numerous publications in sports geography, specifically the roles of geography, culture, and race in baseball. She contributed a chapter on the landscape of “Wrigleyville,” to Northsiders (2008) (Wood, G.R., and A. Hazucha eds., McFarland Press), a book that examined the cultural influences of the Chicago Cubs. Dr. Gripshover is also interested in African Americans’ contributions to baseball and American culture and has written chapters for four books on Negro League baseball published by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) including, Bittersweet Goodbye: The Black Barons, the Grays, and the 1948 Negro League World Series (2017), The 1946 Newark Eagles Take Flight: The Story of the 1946 Negro League Champions (2019), The Pride of Smoketown: The 1935 Pittsburgh Crawfords (2020), and When Monarchs Reigned: Kansas City’s 1942 Negro League Championships (2021). Dr. Gripshover has also published peer-reviewed articles in the Baseball Research Journal on the effects weather on spring training weather during the “Deadball Era,” and on the cultural linkages between dog fighting and 19^th century baseball.

Dr. Gripshover has collaborated with other scholars to study cultural and environmental influences on landscapes, spatial behavior, and innovation. She has worked with Dr. Chris Groves on several projects including an article for the National Speleological Society News (2018) about the significance of the “Irene Ryan” (“Granny on the “Beverly Hillbillies”) signature written on a wall in Mammoth Cave. With Dr. Thomas L. Bell, professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Dr. Gripshover examined how environmental perception and suicide rates influenced newspaper coverage of the “Great Chicago Fire,” an article that appeared in the Bulletin of the Illinois Geographical Society. In 2012, Drs. Gripshover and Bell published, “Patently Good Ideas: Innovations and Inventions in U.S. Onion Farming, 1883-1939” in the journal, Material Culture. The article has been cited as evidence of the positive economic outcomes and technological contributions made by immigrants.

In 2018, Dr. Gripshover introduced a course titled, “Potent Potables: The Geography of the Brewing, Distilling, and Winemaking.” The class is an elective within the WKU Brewery Science certificate program. The course is an outgrowth of Dr. Gripshover’s research interests in the craft beer industry. She has presented conference papers and published research on the geography of craft beer. Most recently, Dr. Gripshover, along with co-authors Dr. Neil Reid of the University of Toledo, and Dr. Thomas L. Bell, produced a chapter titled, “Craft Breweries and Adaptive Reuse in the U.S.: The Use and Reuse of Space and Language” in Handbook of The Changing World Language Map (Brunn, S., and R. Kehrein eds., Springer, 2019). Dr. Gripshover and her co-authors also contributed a chapter to the forthcoming book, COVID-19 and an Emerging World of Ad Hoc Geographies (Brunn S., and D. Gilbreath eds., Springer 2022) titled, “The Craft Brewing Industry in the Age of COVID-19.”

In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, Dr. Gripshover provides research support for the “Friends of the Blue Grass Army Depot Cemeteries” organization in Madison County, Kentucky. The group’s mission is to restore and reimagine two historic reinterment cemeteries that were necessitated by the establishment of the Blue Grass Army Depot in 1942. Dr. Gripshover support for the “Friends” group includes geographical and genealogical research, social media outreach, and fieldwork assistance, gravesite documentation, and mapping. Dr. Margaret M. Gripshover is an active member of numerous professional organizations including the American Association of Geographers (AAG), Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers, the Society for American Baseball Research, and the International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture. She also serves as a board member for the AAG World Geography Bowl, the Kentucky Geographic Names Committee, the Kentucky Geographic Alliance, and as the Kentucky State Representative for SEDAAG. For more information about Dr. Gripshover’s teaching, research, and service interests, contact her at margaret.gripshover@wku.edu.