[2] He then completed both a Masters and a PhD in comparative literature at New York University,[3] with a 2001 thesis titled Savage Modernism: Blood-sacrifice, Literary Primitivism and Culture.

[2] In 2007, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to lecture at Charles University in Prague on "the aesthetics of blackness".

[6] Thompson argues these tendencies were more than merely a response to events in Germany and Italy but an "organise feature of the evolution of blackness.

Adorno, and Klaus Mann,[12] to look at the topic of jazz in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany using a "symptomatic textual reading" to examine attitudes.

[14] Thompson has commented in the media on the Trump administration, the meaning of United States legal institutions such as the filibuster and the Electoral College, as well as police reform and racial profiling.