Dr Deja Whitehouse
I returned to academia in 2016, completing my PhD at the University of Bristol in January 2020, under the supervision of Professor Ronald Hutton. My thesis, In Search of Frieda Harris, explores the life and works of Frieda, Lady Harris, the wife of Sir Percy Harris, Liberal MP and Party Chief Whip, drawing comparisons with the lives of her female esoteric contemporaries.
During my studies, I was engaged by the Warburg Institute to catalogue the Frieda Harris papers held in the Yorke Collection. I also produced an edited consolidation of Harris’s correspondence with Crowley and contributed an article on Frieda Harris’s wartime retreat in the Cotswolds to Signpost, the Chipping Campden History Society’s journal.
I have published various book chapters and journal articles, and presented my research at venues as diverse as the Theosophical Society in Edinburgh, the Glastonbury Occult Conferences, the Magickal Women Conferences, the Trans-States Conferences, Treadwell’s Occult Bookshop, London, and the Warburg Institute.
My monograph on Frieda Harris, The Lady and the Beast: the Extraordinary Partnership between Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley, was published by Oxford University Press’s Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism in December 2024.
I am a member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.
Deja Whitehouse 