southern Italy to do field work among the Arbëreshë people, an Albanian ethnolinguistic group in southern Italy. It was in Italy in 1950 that he received an invitation to join the faculty of the University of Chicago as a lecturer in Linguistics. Hamp spent his entire academic career on the University of Chicago faculty, being promoted to assistant professor in 1953, associate professor in 1958 and full professor in 1962. He retired from teaching in 1991. At Chicago, he was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics, where he served as chair from 1966 to 1969. 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. He served as director for the Center for Balkan and Slavic Studies from 1965 to 1991. He was a visiting fellow and faculty member at a number of institutions throughout the world, including the University of Michigan; the University of Wisconsin; the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; the University of Edinburgh; and the Luigj Gurakuqi University of Shkodër, Albania. 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. Hamp was a prodigious lecturer, and among the invited talks he has given were the Rudolf Thurneysen Memorial Lecture at the University of Bonn and the James W. Poultney Lecture at Johns Hopkins University. Selected honors Hamp's extensive career brought him recognition from multiple disciplines in language studies, including six Festschriften: one in general linguistics, two in Balkan studies, one in Native American languages, one in Indo-European linguistics and one in Celtic studies. These works include Studies in Balkan Linguistics to Honor Eric P. Hamp on his Sixtieth Birthday, Folia Slavica 4, 2–3, published in 1981 and edited by Howard I. Aronson and Bill J. Darden; Celtic Language, Celtic Culture: A Festschrift for Eric P. Hamp, published in 1990 and edited by A.T. E. Matonis and Daniel F. Melia; and Scritti in onore di Eric Pratt Hamp per il suo 90. compleanno, edited by Giovanni Belluscio and Antonio Mendicino of the University of Calabria and published in 2010 (ISBN 9 788874 581016). Hamp was a member of many academies and learned societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American