Thayer is a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center, studying the labor history of seafarers, tracing their development from the Age of Sail to modern container ships. He serves as an Adjunct Lecturer with the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College, CUNY and works as the Archivist at the Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and New Jersey. He is a Graduate Fellow at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies.