Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (born 1944) 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 (Ph.D., 1974), 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.