He was James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University, and a co-editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam.
[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.
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.
[2] In 1996 he succeeded Muhsin Mahdi as the James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard.