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Robert Farris Thompson (December 30, 1932 – November 29, 2021) was an American art historian and writer who specialized in Africa and the Afro-Atlantic world. He was a member of the faculty at Yale University from 1965 to his retirement more than fifty years later and served 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.He lived in the Yoruba region of southwest Nigeria while he conducted his research of Yoruba arts history. He was affiliated with the University of Ibadan and frequented Yoruba village communities. Thompson studied the African arts of the diaspora in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and several Caribbean islands.