James Westfall Thompson (1869–1941) was an American historian specializing in the history of medieval and early modern Europe, particularly of the Holy Roman Empire and France.
He also made noteworthy contributions to the history of literacy, libraries and the book trade in the Middle Ages.
Thompson was one of the most prolific academics of his generation and wrote on a wide range of subjects, from the French Revolution to the economic structures of the Carolingian Empire to the history of espionage in early modern Europe.
Thompson's two-volume study of the social and economic history of medieval Germany, Feudal Germany, appropriated elements of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous Frontier Thesis and applied them to the colonization of Slavic central Europe by German settlers in the Middle Ages.
He is the namesake of the University of Chicago's Thompson Residence Hall, located in Pierce Tower.