Eric C. Thompson is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Before joining NUS, he completed a PhD in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California Los Angeles. He is co-editor of the Asian Journal of Social Sciences and associate editor of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.

He teaches anthropology, gender studies, Southeast Asian studies, and research methods. He has conducted research for three decades throughout Southeast Asia, primarily in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. His research interests include transnational networking, gender studies, urban-rural interactions, planetary urbanization, agrarian transitions, culture theory, and ASEAN regionalism.

His work has appeared in the journals American Ethnologist, Asian Studies Review, Citizenship Studies, Contemporary Sociology, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Current Anthropology, Field Methods, Gender Place and Culture, Global Networks, Political Geography, Urban Studies, and Women's Studies International Forum among others. He is author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (NUS Press, 2007), Attitudes and Awareness toward ASEAN (with Chulanee Thianthai, ISEAS Press, 2008), Do Young People Know ASEAN? (with Moe Thuzar and Chulanee Thianthai, 2015), and co-editor of Southeast Asian Anthropologies: National Traditions and Transnational Practices (NUS Press, 2019) and Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective (Amsterdam University Press, 2019).