Victoria E Thompson

Victoria Thompson's work combines cultural and social history approaches, focusing on the interplay between representation and experience. Her research interests include the history of urban space, travel and travel writing, the history of women, gender and sexuality, political culture, and the role of emotion in the formation of collective and individual identities. 

She is the author of La Place Louis XV from the Old Regime to the Revolution: King and People in the Parisian Royal Square (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment published by Liverpool University Press, 2025), co-author with Rachel G. Fuchs of Women in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), and author ofThe Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870  (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 

She is co-editor with Suzanne Desan and Bryant T. Ragan of Everyday Politics and Culture in Revolutionary France: Essays in Honor of Lynn Hunt (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment published by Liverpool University Press, 2025) and editor of The Cultural History of Work in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2018). She has published articles and book chapters on colonial Algeria, British travelers in revolutionary Paris, Parisian travel guides and urban monuments, and revolutionary spaces and memory. She is currently working on a project on politics and public spaces in Paris during the French Revolution.

Thompson has served in leadership positions as president of the Society for French Historical Studies, co-president of the Western Society for 18th Century Studies, and as co-chair of the Advanced Placement European History Curriculum Development and Assessment Committee. She has served on prize committees for the American Historical Association and the Society for French Historical Studies, on the editorial board of French Historical Studies, and on selection committees for the Fulbright Fellowship and the International Dissertation Research Fellowship.