After hearing the term Dark Academia time and time again, I began watching videos on YouTube and looking up pins on Pinterest to see what the fuss was all about, and I liked what I saw. It turns out that the term Dark Academia became a thing in the mid-2010s, spreading through Tumblr mood boards until it found its way onto YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram. But that’s just when the name Dark Academia became popular.  

The concept behind Dark Academia reaches back to the Gothic novel. Here are some books that helped inspire the Dark Academia genre. My favorite film, Dead Poets Society, can definitely be considered Dark Academia. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History remains the aesthetic’s unofficial flagship. The story about murder in a small New England Classics department still functions as a kind of north star for the rest of us who have come to enjoy the Dark Academia genre. The Secret History inspired me to write my own Dark Academia literary mystery. But more on the story behind The Professor of Eventide next week. 

Quite honestly, I love researching interesting topics for their own sakes. Learning and making sense of the world we live in is one of the best things about being alive. For me, Dark Academia is important because it shows us what life would be like if we took learning seriously. I don’t necessarily mean learning on a college or university campus, though as someone with a PhD, I think it can be pretty cool under the right circumstances. I mean, what if we took knowledge seriously? What if we actually cared about something? 

But the genre isn’t only Academia. It’s Dark Academia. It acknowledges the darkness we all have within us. It shines a spotlight on obsession. There’s a particular kind of intensity in Dark Academia, and stories with Dark Academia settings show us a world where caring too much about Greek literature, or nineteenth-century authors, is not nerdy but dangerous and even seductive. Borrowing heavily from Gothic literature and the Romantic movement, the genre thrives on memento mori—remember you will die. In Dark Academia stories, the stakes are life and death, which we see in both Dead Poets Society and The Secret History. The atmosphere is melancholy, and it contains so much of what I love: candlelight, reading, studying, rain, libraries, and university campuses. I laugh whenever I see the word analog to describe non-digital living. When I was younger, we called it paper. You know, as in you write things down on paper. But I think that’s another reason why we’re drawn to Dark Academia. It’s a reminder of a time when not everything was digital. In Dark Academia, we hear the scratch of a fountain pen on heavy paper or the mechanical click of a typewriter. We feel the physical weight of a hardcover book in our hands. We hear the sound of rain hitting glass instead of hiding away from the world behind headphones. 

Spending time in old, dusty libraries and learning for learning’s sake has become a fantasy for many of us today. The idea of slowing down and devoting yourself fully to whatever your interest happens to be is a dream for those of us who live in a world where we’re constantly bombarded with noise, quick-time videos, and rampant consumerism. It feels like there’s something almost radical in fantasizing about people who read for sixteen hours straight by candlelight.

Modern life is sadly boring in its aesthetics. I’ve often noticed how plain our world is compared to how things used to look. Where I live in Southern Nevada, the buildings are just plain ugly. We have what we call strip malls where our shopping centers are located, and they’re, well, ugly. Okay, okay, if you’re familiar with the Victorian era  you know that hidden within the pretty wallpapers and furnishings was poison, as in literally poison, as in arsenic, so that’s probably not the best example. But there must be a way to incorporate care with our surroundings that won’t poison us to death. 

These days, we swipe, and we scroll, and we consume without paying too much attention to how we’re spending the precious hours of our lives. In a way, I see the Dark Academia aesthetic as almost being old-fashioned. It puts us into a frame of mind where we take great concern with how we spend our time. In Dark Academia, how we spend our time is important. I think the aesthetic speaks to a dissatisfaction many of us are feeling right now, this sense that what we’re consuming online isn’t really all that important, and we’re frittering our hours away doing things that don’t fill us up in positive ways.  

In an era of doomscrolling and ten-second soundbites, Dark Academia offers a sanctuary of unapologetic intellectualism. It romanticizes the act of study. It transforms the act of learning into a high-stakes obsession, making us feel that knowledge is power. Yes, in Dark Academia there is a darkness behind that knowledge, and it speaks to the darkness we all struggle with in one way or another. 

Quite frankly, I love the higher education settings of Dark Academia. I spent six years teaching at the university level, and I love being on college campuses. Dark Academia campuses are often more impressive than real-life colleges and they’re often Gothic in tone (at least, Eventide College is Gothic in tone). Stone walls, winding walkways, never-ending fog, and students who are devoted to their subjects represent higher education in its most idealized form. Dark Academia aesthetics have occasionally been criticized for the exclusivity of those spaces, and that’s a fair criticism. I spoke about that here. I personally didn’t attend or teach at universities that we might consider privileged institutions. I prefer working with students who have everything to gain from an education. 

For me, Dark Academia is about the search for meaning in an online world that feels increasingly pointless and shallow. The genre reminds us that there are still mysteries to be solved, books to be read, and meaning to be discovered. The more detached we become from the world around us, the more Dark Academia will continue to have a place as a beloved genre. It has certainly become a beloved genre of mine.