Victoria E. Thompson's work combines cultural and social history approaches, focusing on the interplay between representation and experience. Her research has focused primarily on France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and particularly Paris. However, she has also published on colonial Algiers and on British travelers in revolutionary Paris. Her research interests include the history of urban space, travel and travel writing, the history of women, gender and sexuality, political culture, and the role of emotion in the formation of collective and individual identites.

She is the author of "The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870" (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) and, with Rachel G. Fuchs, "Women in European History" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).  She has recently published articles on colonial Algeria, British travelers in revolutionary Paris, Parisian travel guides and urban monuments. She is currently completing a  monograph entitled, "Inventing Public Space in Paris, 1748-1792." She edited and contributed to The Cultural History of Work in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Thompson has taught a variety of courses, both online and onground, on European and French history and on cultural history.  Undergraduate courses include courses on European Women's History, the History of Sexuality, French Imperialism, the French Revolution, European travel and European counter-cultures. On the graduate level she has developed courses on European Cultural History, History and Memory and Space and Place.

She has served in leadership positions as president of the Society for French Historical Studies, co-president of the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and as co-chair of the Advanced Placement European History Curriculum Development and Assessment Committee. She has served on prize committees for the American Historical Association and the Society for French Historical Studies, on the editorial board of French Historical Studies and on selection committees for the Fulbright Fellowshiop and the International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC).