Nicholas L. Heer, Professor Emeritus at the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1955. Nicholas Heer received his B.A. from Yale University in 1949 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1955. From 1955 to 1957 he worked as a translation analyst for the Arabian American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia. In 1958 he returned to the United States to become curator of the Middle East collections of the Hoover Institutions at Stanford University. The following year he was appointed assistant professor of Arabic in the Department of Asian Languages at Stanford. During the academic year 1962-63 he was a visiting lecturer at Yale University, and from 1963 to 1965 he was an assistant professor of Arabic at Harvard University. In 1965 he was appointed associate professor of Arabic at the University of Washington and was subsequently promoted to full professor in 1976. In 1982 he was named chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization and served in that capacity until 1987. He retired from the University of Washington in 1990 at the age of 62.

His publications include an Arabic edition of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jami’s al-Durrah al-Fakhirah (Wisdom of Persia Series XIX, Tehran, 1980) and an English translation of the same work published under the same title The Precious Pearl (Albany: SUNY Press, 1979). Other relevant publications are: ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jami’s The Precious Pearl; Al-Jami’s al-Durrah al-Fakhirah together with his Glosses and the Commentary of ‘Abd al-Ghafur al-Lari translated with an introduction, notes, and glossary by Nicholas Heer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979); ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jami al-Durrah al-Fakhirah, edited with the glosses of al-Jami and the commentaries of ‘Abd al-Ghafur al-Lari and ‘Imad al-Dawlah by N. Heer and A. Musawi Bihbahani; Wisdom of Persia Series XIV, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Tehran Branch. Tehran, 1358/1980.