Sarah Thomason has also held different positions as a professor, editor or adviser in different institutions. She taught Slavic Linguistics at Yale from 1968 to 1971, before moving to the University of Pittsburgh in 1972. From 1988 to 1994 she was the editor of "Language", the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. In 1999 she was the Collitz Professor at the Linguistic Society of America summer institute. In 2000 she was President of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. She was also Chair of the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1996, and Secretary of the section from 2001 to 2005.