Unlike many Indo-Europeanists, who work entirely on the basis of written materials, he conducted extensive fieldwork on lesser-known Indo-European languages and dialects, such as Albanian, Arbëresh and Arvanitika; Breton; Welsh; Irish; Resian and Scots Gaelic.

[1] Hamp's scholarship was characterized by the densely argued, narrowly focused note, essay and review, generally consisting of a few pages.

He was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago[2] and in spite of his advanced age, he continued to write, edit, speak and travel at select meetings and conferences,[3] and was an Associate Editor of the journal Anthropological Linguistics.

[4][5] Hamp was born in London in 1920 and moved to the United States in 1925 when his father became the New York representative of the Silver Line, a British shipping company.

Hamp also held appointments at the University of Chicago in the departments of Psychology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, as well as in the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World.

In 1960, he held the Hermann and Klara H. Collitz Professorship for Comparative Philology at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute at the University of Texas.

[11] On his 92nd birthday in 2012, Posta Shqiptare, the national postal service of Albania, honored Hamp with a 50 lekë stamp in a series commemorating foreign Albanologists, linguists who have studied the Albanian language.