[2] Thompson was born in 1939, the daughter of historian F. W. Walbank and his wife Mary (née Fox).
[1] In her research and writing Thompson employs the evidence of papyri to look at social and economic questions; she is further concerned with relations between the different ethnic groups of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt.
She has taught extensively at Cambridge (Isaac Newton Lectureship in the Faculty of Classics, 1992–2005) with a visiting professorship in 1996 at Princeton University.
She was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1982–1983 as well as a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina in 1993–1994.
[3] Her 1988 book Memphis under the Ptolemies was awarded the 1989 James H. Breasted Prize by the American Historical Association.