Deborah Harkness

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-09-04

Deborah Harkness was born in 1965 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to an American father and British mother. She holds a BA from Mount Holyoke College (1986), an MA from Northwestern University (1990), and a PhD from the University of California, Davis (1994), and also studied at Oxford University. She is a professor of history at the University of Southern California, specializing in European history and the history of science, and is a well-regarded historian of magic and the scientific revolution, having authored the scholarly works John Dee's Conversations with Angels (1999) and The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (2007). She turned to fiction with the All Souls Trilogy, comprising A Discovery of Witches (2011), which debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list, Shadow of Night (2012), which reached number one, and The Book of Life (2014). She continued the series with Time's Convert (2018) and The Black Bird Oracle (2024). Harkness also wrote a companion guide to the trilogy and maintains an award-winning wine blog alongside her academic and fiction writing.

Universe(s)

Books

• A Discovery of Witches (2011) · All Souls Universe Core Canon
• Shadow of Night (2012) · All Souls Universe Core Canon
• The Book of Life (2014) · All Souls Universe Core Canon
• Time's Convert (2018) · All Souls Universe Expanded Canon
• The Black Bird Oracle (2024) · All Souls Universe Expanded Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 3 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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