Professor Hugh Cheape has devised and teaches a postgraduate programme, MSc Cultar Dùthchasach agus Eachdraidh na Gàidhealtachd, at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI, the National Centre for Gaelic Language and Culture. The MSc has grown out of his curatorial and ethnological work during a career in the National Museums of Scotland where latterly he was Principal Curator in the Department of Scotland and Europe.

He joined the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland in 1974 as a Research Assistant with Professor Sandy Fenton and was involved with the creation of the Angus Farming Life Museum in the Angus Folk Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, the Museum of Scottish Country Life at Wester Kittochside (now the National Museum of Rural Life) and the Museum of Piping in the National Piping Centre.

He has published in the subject fields of ethnology and musicology, including studies in Scottish agricultural history, vernacular architecture, piping, tartans and dye analysis, pottery, charms and amulets and talismanic belief. His books include Periods in Highland History (1987) with I F Grant, Tartan. The Highland Habit (1991), Witness to Rebellion (1996) with Iain Gordon Brown, The Book of the Bagpipe (1999), Bagpipes. A national collection of a national instrument (2008), and he has edited Tools and Traditions. Studies in European Ethnology presented to Alexander Fenton (1993) and 'A very civil people': Hebridean Folk, History, and Tradition. Essays by John Lorne Campbell (2000).

From 1997 he worked with the School of Scottish Studies on the Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches project to digitize the sound archives of John Lorne Campbell, the School of Scottish Studies and the BBC.

Professor Cheape lectures at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI and also at Edinburgh University.

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