Margaret Sharpe has been an honorary research fellow at the University of New England, New South Wales and formerly lectured in sociolinguistics in that University's Department of Aboriginal and Multicultural Studies. She was a research fellow in Linguistics at the University of Queensland funded to record Aboriginal languages that were endangered or going out of use. Sharpe was supervised by Professor Ken Hamilton of the English Department with input from Elwyn Flint, a linguist. She has spent her academic career studying the Alawa and Bundjalung languages of the Northern Territory, Northern New South Wales and Southern Queensland; Kriol in the Northern Territory and Aboriginal English in Queensland, Alice Springs and Northern New South Wales. Sharpe has published a number of monographs, articles and book chapters on these languages.
(Source: Margaret Sharpe, 'Allen Hall 6 September 1918-August 2004', Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (2004): 135-136. 'Contributors' in Language and Culture in Aboriginal Australia ed. by Michael Walsh and Colin Yallop (1993):225)