Origins
Where there is academia, there is dark academia. Dark academia is academia’s black swan and shadow self, a mirror that reflects and opposes: it’s how academics want to see themselves, the apotheosis and the parody of who they always already are. Pythagoras, chased by enemies, refusing to run through a field of beans because he believed they resembled fetuses, and wouldn’t kill them, so died himself instead. Hypatia, Neoplatonist mathematician, martyred for teaching philosophy. The invention of the zero.

Dark academia is both young and old, richly storied yet impossible to pin down. But the internet iteration of the genre [1] officially began in 1992, with the publication of The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s disgustingly delicious debut novel and the ürtext for the next decades of meme. [2] “Beginning with endings, The Secret History’s prologue is a foray into the novel’s own future,” writes dark academia scholar Olivia Stowell. [3] The first wave of Covid-19 saw a rise of “pandemia”––that is, pandemic dark academia. School closures sparked a massive orgiastic frenzy of academy worship. [4]

The core dark academia aesthetic comprises many delicious subcategories. Prep school dark academia—What Was She Thinking?: Notes On A Scandal; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Dead Poets Society, etc.—tend to be very Brit-based, very Gothic architecture erogenous zone, very white. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark’s novel…