Wolfhart P. Heinrichs (3 October 1941 – 23 January 2014) was a German-born scholar of Arabic. He was James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University, and a co-editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. He taught Classical Arabic language and literature, particularly Arabic literary theory and criticism.[1]
Wolfhart Heinrichs was born in Cologne into an academic family: his father, H. Matthias Heinrichs, was professor of ancient Germanic studies at the University of Giessen and the Free University of Berlin; his mother, Anne Heinrichs, a lecturer on Old Norse, was made a professor at the Free University at the age of 80.[2]
He was educated at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Cologne before studying Islamic studies at the University of Cologne. After a year at the School of Oriental and African StudiesinLondon, he continued studying at the Universities of Frankfurt and Giessen. He gained his PhD in 1967 for a thesis on Hazim al-Qartajanni's reception of Aristotelian poetics, and spent a year at the Orient-Institut Beirut.[2]
Heinrichs taught at Giessen from 1968 to 1977, when he went to Harvard University as a visiting lecturer, and in 1978 took up a permanent position there.[1] In 1980 he married Alma Giese, an independent scholar and translator from Arabic. In 1989 he became a co-editor of the new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, for which he also wrote fifty articles himself.[2] In 1996 he succeeded Muhsin Mahdi as the James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard.[1]AFestschrift was published in 2008.[2]
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