Quick Facts
Biography
Mark Christian Thompson (born c. 1970) is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. His research and teaching concentrate on the comparative critical study of race in German and African American literature, politics and culture.
Early life and education
Thompson was born in New York City and speaks fluent German and French. He is the son of an African American father and a mother immigrated from Sicily. Thompson lives in Baltimore and spends half of the year in Prague. He studied art history as an undergraduate and is a prolific visual artist in painting and drawing. He completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University.
Career
At Johns Hopkins University, Thompson teaches both undergraduates and graduate students in courses including "The Philosophy of African American Literature; African American Literary Theory and Criticism"; "Modernism and Sacrifice; The Body, Space, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Fiction"; "African American Literature: The Beginnings to 1914"; "Slave Narratives and Neo-Slave Narratives"; "The Gothic Novel"; "The Bible as Literature"; and "Introduction to Literary Study".
Thompson is the author of two books, Kafka’s Blues: Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic (Northwestern University Press, 2016), and Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars (University of Virginia Press, 2007). In Kafka's Blues, Thompson argues that many of Kafka’s major works engage in a "coherent, sustained meditation on racial blackness", while in Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture Between the Wars, he addresses the fact that many African American intellectuals in the 1930s sympathized with fascism.
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.