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, serving for some time as the director of CUW's Madison Center for Adult Learning. Returning to the study and teaching of Arabic in 2002, she participated in the CASA program in Cairo in 2003-04, joined the NELC Department at the University of Chicago in 2004, and taught several summers in Middlebury College's Arabic School. She has also published translations of several Arabic novels. Currently she offers the High Intermediate Classical Arabic sequence and a quarter-length course exploring several works of short modern Arabic fiction.