Spurgeon Thompson teaches British, Irish, and world literature at Fordham University and Adelphi University. He has taught at New York University's Glucksman Ireland House, as well as the University of Notre Dame, and spent a decade teaching in Cyprus. For the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for Dialogue Between Cultures, he served as coordinator of its Sea of Words writing workshops in Sofia, Bulgaria, as well as Nicosia, Cyprus bringing together young writers from 16 different divided countries committed to peace. He wrote and co-edited the Gender and Media Handbook, published by the Mediterranean Institute for Gender Studies, and founded and edited Cadences, a multilingual literary journal in Cyprus.

He has published articles in the field of postcolonial studies on Joyce, Yeats, James Connolly, and other Irish writers in Irish Studies Review, Eire-Ireland, The Irish University Review, the International Journal of English Studies, The Irish Journal of Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. He also has published articles on Cyprus in Interventions, and is the editor of the 'Irish Cultural Studies' special issue of Cultural Studies (2001) and the March 2008 special issue of Interventions on James Connolly. He is currently working on a book entitled English is Dead: The Global Politics of Finnegan's Wake.