Kay Heikkinen earned a Ph.D. in French language and literature from Harvard University, with a specialization in the medieval period and a dissertation on the transmission of learning in tenth-century Islamic Spain. She taught at Concordia University Wisconsin, and served as the director of CUW's Madison Center for Adult Learning.
In 2002, Heikkinen returned to the study and teaching of Arabic, and was a 2003-2004 CASA Fellow in Cairo. After CASA, she joined the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2004, and taught several summers in Middlebury College's Arabic School. While she retired in 2021, she most recently offered the High Intermediate Classical Arabic sequence and a course exploring several works of short modern Arabic fiction.
In addition to teaching, Heikkinen has also published translations of several Arabic novels. She was awarded the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2020 for her translation of Huzama Habayeb's novel Velvet (Hoopoe Books,2019). Her translation of Huzama Habayeb ’s Before the Queen Falls Asleep was published by MacLehose Press in March 2021. The novel centers on the life story of a girl named Jihad—so named because her parents wanted a boy. The novel shades in a portrait of Palestinian life in exile, and it’s told with humor and intimacy, as the family must travel from Kuwait to Jordan and later to Dubai. Among the other books, she has translated are Naguib Mahfouz’s In the Time of Love (AUC Press, 2010) and Radwa Ashour’s The Woman from Tantoura (AUC Press, 2014).
