Robert Farris Thompson (born December 30, 1932, El Paso, Texas) is an American historian and writer specialising in the art of Africa and the Afro-Atlantic world. He has been a member of the faculty at Yale University since 1965 and currently serves as the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art. Thompson coined the term "black Atlantic" in his 1983 book "Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy" - the expanded subject of Paul Gilroy's book "The Black Atlantic".