Karin Thompson is chair of the Walla Walla University music department, a position she has held since January 2009. An associate professor at Atlantic Union College, she had been serving as chair of the music department and acting Academic Dean at AUC since June 2007.

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Thompson completed a B.Mus. degree at Walla Walla College, now University, in 1991. She went on to finish an M.Mus. in cello performance at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1993.

While an undergraduate and graduate student, she attended the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, the Encore School for Strings in Hudson, Ohio, and the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin, Ohio. Her principal teachers included Christopher von Baeyer, Stephen Kates, Evelyn Elsing, and Kenneth Slowik.

Following completion of her master’s degree, she taught English in St. Petersburg, Russia, for one year. In 2001 she completed a Ph.D. in historical musicology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Thompson began teaching at AUC in 2000 where she taught courses in music history and other interdisciplinary humanities topics in the general education curriculum. She is married to Thomas Wehtje, a 1990 graduate of AUC who was teaching in the English department at AUC at the time of their move to WWU.

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