He is currently an emeritus professor at the Department of Linguistics and English Language of Lancaster University, United Kingdom.
[2] Katamba received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1974 with a dissertation entitled, "Aspects of the Grammar of Luganda.
[5] He had a long and fruitful collaboration with Larry Hyman investigating Luganda phonology .
[6] Katamba claimed that exocentric compounds are headless - in other words they do not contain an element that can function as a semantic head in Morphology in 1993.
(edited with William O'Grady and Michael Dobrovolsky, London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997) and Morphology: Critical Concepts.