Edward Arthur Thompson was an Irish-born British classicist, medievalist and professor at the University of Nottingham from 1948 to 1979.
Background
Thompson was born on 22 May 1914 in the town of Waterford, Ireland to an Presbyterian family of both Irish and Scottish descent. Although his father worked for the administration of the National Health Insurance, Edward Thompson would be the first of his family to enter university: he graduated with First Class Honours in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin in 1936, later attributing his selection of the classics as a discipline to the arbitrary choice of his headmaster at The High School.
Career
He wrote from a Marxist perspective, and argued that the Visigoths were settled in Aquitaine to counter the internal threat of the peasant bagaudae. Although taught to read only at the age of eight, Thompson proceeded to attend and finish at The High School, Dublin, with which he maintained sufficient links to be requested by its then-headmaster, Doctor John Bennett, to send a copy of A History of Attila and the Huns when Thompson published the book in 1948. Thompson"s first appointment in academia, as Lecturer in Classics, was a two-year stint at Trinity College, Dublin – although initially appointed for one year, Thompson"s contract was renewed, and he stayed on (though at a reduced salary) until 1941.
From Swansea, Thompson transferred to King"s College, London, teaching as a classics lecturer from 1945 to 1948.
lieutenant was during this time that Thompson"s first book, Ammianus Marcellinus, was published in Britain. He subsequently moved once more – this time to direct the classics department at the University of Nottingham, where Thompson worked from 1948-1979.
Until his retirement in 1979, Thompson served as the first Chairman of the Editorial Board of the scholarly journal Nottingham Medieval Studies, founded by Lewis Thorpe in 1957. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1964 – the first University of Nottingham academic to be so honoured.
Although Thompson left the staunchly pro-Soviet Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956, the year of the Soviet Union"s intervention in Hungary, Thompson"s academic work continued to demonstrate a Marxist-oriented outlook on history.
Number longer active in political life, he continued his enthusiastic interest for politics. His interest in the class structure of societies, and in their material basis, continued to direct the structure of his studies. Thompson died, aged 79, in Nottingham.