Deborah Harkness Books in Order

Deborah Harkness is an American historian and novelist who has built a career at the point where archives meet imagination. Born in 1965, she grew up near Philadelphia as the daughter of an American father and a British mother and always gravitated toward stories about the past.

She studied Renaissance history at Mount Holyoke College, then went on to earn a master’s degree in European history from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Davis. Time spent studying in Oxford, moving between college quads and the Bodleian Library, quietly set the stage for the novels she would later write.

For Harkness, libraries were never just buildings, but living systems where curiosity, memory, and paper all meet.

As a scholar, she focuses on the history of science, medicine, and magic in early modern Europe, especially between 1500 and 1700. Her teaching and research at the University of Southern California ask how people once blended alchemy, astrology, theology, and hands‑on experiment to make sense of the natural world. Major fellowships from organizations such as Fulbright and Guggenheim have supported that work, but she still describes herself first as a working teacher and historian.

Her early books were firmly academic. John Dee’s Conversations with Angels looks at the visionary angelic sessions of Elizabethan mathematician and magus John Dee, treating them as part of his broader project to read the ‘book of nature’ rather than as a strange sideline. The Jewel House turns to Elizabethan London, reconstructing a busy network of artisans, merchants, medics, and instrument makers whose experiments and arguments helped prepare the ground for the scientific revolution.

That blend of close archival work and an eye for human detail became the foundation for her fiction.

Her career as a novelist began when she found herself in an airport bookstore wondering what witches, vampires, and daemons would look like if they had to live in the real historical world she knew so well. The answer became A Discovery of Witches, in which historian‑witch Diana Bishop uncovers a bewitched manuscript in Oxford and is drawn into a dangerous alliance—and then a romance—with vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont. The book introduced readers to the All Souls universe, where questions about ancestry, genetics, and power sit right beside questions about spellcraft and faith.

Harkness continued Diana and Matthew’s story in Shadow of Night and The Book of Life, and later expanded the world with Time’s Convert, The Black Bird Oracle, and the richly detailed companion The World of All Souls. The novels move from college libraries and New England farmhouses to Elizabethan London and French chateaux, always grounding their magic in specific rooms, streets, and archives. The All Souls trilogy has been adapted for television, with Harkness serving as an executive producer to help translate her blend of history, suspense, and romance to the screen.

Alongside this work she has also written about another passion: wine. Her long‑running blog, Good Wine Under $20, grew out of the same instinct that drives her teaching and fiction—a wish to make specialized knowledge, whether about vintages or seventeenth‑century manuscripts, feel welcoming rather than exclusive. She lives in Southern California, continues to teach and to write, and keeps returning to the same core questions: how people make sense of the unknown, and how the stories we inherit still shape the lives we live now.