Professor Thompson graduated from St. Andrews University in 1974 and pursued a Masters degree in Economic and Political Thought at the Queen’s University Belfast, 1975, before undertaking research leading to the award of a doctorate by the University of Cambridge, 1981. He spent a short time in the Economic Intelligence Department of the Bank of England, 1978-79 before being appointed as a Lecturer in Economic History at Swansea, 1979. He was awarded a personal chair in 1999, was Head of the Department of History from 2000 to 2005, and served as Head of the School of Humanities from its inception to 2008. He is currently a Pro-Vice-Chancellor.

Professor Thompson serves on the editorial board of Labor History.

Current research

Professor Noel Thompson’s research is focused primarily on the history of British anti-capitalist and socialist political economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current focus is the idea of consumption and the place of material culture in British nineteenth and twentieth century socialist political economies.

Principal Publications

Books

• Political Economy and the Labour Party: the economics of democratic socialism, 1884-2005, (London: Routledge, 2006)
• Left in the wilderness: the political economy of British democratic socialism since 1979 (Teddington: Acumen, 2002)
• The Real Rights of Man: Political economies for the working class, 1775-1850 (London: Pluto, 1998)
• (ed.), Counterblasts to Cobbett, 1797-1835 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1998)
• (ed., with D. Eastwood), The Social and Political Writings of William Cobbett, 16 vols. (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1998)
• Political Economy and the Labour Party: the economics of democratic socialism, 1884-1995, (London: University College London Press, 1996)
• John Strachey: an intellectual biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993)
• The Market and its Critics: socialist political economy in nineteenth-century Britain (London: Routledge, 1988)
• The People's Science: the popular political economy of exploitation and crisis, 1816-34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)

Book-chapters & journal articles

• 'From Hayek to New Labour: the changing ideology of public service provision', in P.Dibben et al., eds., Modernising work in public services: redefining roles and relationships in Britain's changing workplace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 11-28
• 'Socialist Political Economies and the Growth of Mass Consumption in Britain and the United States, 1880 to 1914', Review of Radical Political Economics , 39 (2007), 230-256
• 'The Fabian Political Economy of Harold Wilson', in P. Dorey, ed., The Labour Governments, 1964-1970 (London: Routledge, 2006), 53-72
• 'Economic thought', in C. Williams, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 321-333
• 'That stakeholder moment: embracing the Anglo-American model', Renewal: a Journal of Labour Politics, 11 (2003), 37-47
• 'Social opulence, private asceticism: the idea of consumption in early socialist thought', in M. Daunton and M. Hilton, eds., The politics of consumption: material culture and citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 51-68 

Principal research awards, fellowships, & prizes

• Winner of the American Library Association's Choice magazine 'outstanding academic book' award, 1997 for Political Economy and the Labour Party