Wheeler Thackston

Who is Wheeler Thackston?

Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. is an Orientalist and distinguished editor and translator of numerous Chaghatai, Arabic and Persian literary and historical sources.

Thackston is a graduate of Princeton's Oriental Studies department, where he was a member of Princeton's Colonial Club, and Harvard's Near Eastern Studies department, where he was Professor of the Practice of Persian and other Near Eastern Languages since 1972. He studied at Princeton under Martin Dickson and at Harvard with Annemarie Schimmel. Thackston retired from teaching at Harvard in 2007.

His best known works are Persian and Classical and Qur'anic Arabic grammars and his translations of the Babur-nama, the memoirs of the Mughal prince and emperor Babur, and the memoirs of Emperor Jahangir, or the Jahangir-nama. He has also produced important manuals or editions of texts in Levantine Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Syriac, Uzbek, Luri, and Kurdish.

He has also studied Urdu and Sindhi but has not published texts from these languages.

Thackston has retired from his position at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. He currently resides in Cambridge, MA.