[2] At Harvard, he studied under George Kitteridge, "one of the key figures in the development of folklore as an academic discipline in the United States".
[4] Thompson was trained as a literary scholar and his early research was focused on Henry Mackenzie, a Scottish lawyer and writer.
As a teacher, Thompson was one of the first American Folklorists to send students out to collect lore in their local environs.
[3] It has been noted that most of the students who contributed to Body, Books and Britches, were young women training to be teachers.
[3] Thompson's folklore classes at Cornell involved "singing, dancing, listening and reciting" and introducing students to a wide range of tales and music.
Over time, it featured live performances by Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Thompson's former student Pete Seeger.
His proposers were William Metzler, John Alexander Inglis, Robert Hannay and Charles Galton Darwin.