Rate My Professor Wendy Thompson

Wendy Thompson is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at San José State University, where she has been teaching since fall 2018. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland, earned in 2009. Her academic interests include cultural criticism, material culture studies, comparative and critical ethnic studies, and performance studies. Thompson's research centers on the Second Great Migration, racial performance, blackness and belonging in the San Francisco Bay Area, housing scarcity and gentrification, black displacement, changing demographics, and African American connections to the natural world. She utilizes mixed methods drawn from cultural studies, visual culture studies, performance studies, and black feminist praxis.

Currently, Thompson is revising her book manuscript titled Chasing the Sun: Staging Life, Belonging and Displacement in the Black Bay Area, which frames African American reverse migration and displacement within the extended Great Migration using "staging" as a lens for performances, objects, spaces, and gestures. She has submitted a first poetry collection based on her multiracial Black-Chinese experiences in the Bay Area, with poems forthcoming in journals. Notable publications include co-editing Sparked: George Floyd, Racism, and the Progressive Illusion (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2021), featuring her chapter "All the Stars Point North"; "Bringing Home the News: Reading Black Family History, the Second World War, and Change in Marin City" (California History, 2022); "Weird/Black/Play" (The Radical Teacher, 2022); and "Despite Your Tiger Mother, or Your Other Racial Half Will Not Save You from What the World Thinks of Your Blackness" (Meridians, 2018). Upcoming is Black California Gold (Rutgers University Press, 2025). She teaches courses like AFAM/ENVS 151 on Race, Class, and the Environment and serves as undergraduate advisor. Her work integrates personal family history with broader scholarly inquiry into racialized property, suburbanization, and collective memory.