What Is Dark Academia?

Dark academia is an online subculture with a heavy emphasis on reading and writing, manifesting primarily through a pre-Internet retrograde aesthetic that is practiced in videos, social media posts, and moodboards and pertains to literature, film, music, art, and other creative interests. It is characterized by a romanticization of traditional elite academia, references to classic literature, and a mysterious atmosphere.

Overview

Many practitioners of dark academia turn to the Western literary past for inspiration. Though many depictions look to the 19th and early 20th centuries, some content references a diverse range of movements, from Greek and Roman epic and tragedy, Gothic literature, and Romantic poetry to Russian Realism and confessional poetry.

The prevailing motifs include Anglo-American boarding schools and college campuses, accoutrements with a romantic aura (billowing sleeves, melting candles), and analog artifacts (old compasses, monocles). The setting of dark academia fiction and media mirrors the atmospheric locales of cities such as London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Versailles and campuses such as Oxford, Trinity College Dublin, Harvard University and other Ivy League schools, the University of Chicago, and the University of Toronto.

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Moodboards and posts on social media feature images with earthy neutral colors, Gothic architecture, vintage knitwear, handwritten notes, dark vintage photographs, oil paintings, marble busts, skulls, stacks of worn-out books, yellowed paper with fountain pen ink and charcoal, and fog, among other visual elements.

The internet genre of dark academia is often traced to the subculture’s “urtext,” The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt. The internationally best-selling novel follows six students studying ancient Greek at an elite university in the northeastern United States in the 1980s and their deteriorating relationships and mental states as secrets unravel.

Audience

The phrase dark academia was popularized primarily on the social media platforms Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and TikTok. Under the hashtag #darkacademia, there were millions of Instagram posts and hundreds of thousands of TikTok posts, adding up to billions of hashtag views. Excluding sales of classic literature that appeal to the aesthetic, popular dark academia titles such as The Secret History and Ninth House (2019) by Leigh Bardugo have sold millions of copies.

The audience of dark academia content is dominated by Generation Z (people born between 1997 and 2012), recent or current students, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. In fact, a common facet of dark academia literature and film is the depiction of homosexual and homoerotic characters and relationships, especially between two men.

However, dark academia has been criticized for the lack of people of color—especially Black women—represented in its canon and aesthetic. These critiques were amplified by Black content creators and the general social media audience, who took issue with the genre’s Eurocentric portrayal of knowledge and intellectualism. Many Black female-identifying dark academia creators began inviting other BIPOC and underrepresented people to their social media spaces to foster diversity and inclusiveness. Subsequently, their content incorporated the more traditional visual markers of dark academia alongside non-European cultural features such as Afros or hijabs.

Origin

Much like the atmospheric texts it reveres, the origin of the subculture of dark academia is something of a mystery. By 2014, though, it had emerged on the blogging site Tumblr. It was preceded by “studyblr,” a popular Tumblr community that focused on studying, school, and college life. The subculture then migrated to Twitter before shifting to more visual platforms such as Pinterest. By 2017 dark academia had been introduced to Instagram.

After this initial wave dark academia achieved a surge in attention in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of lockdowns and social distancing, reading and book sales increased sharply and bolstered the advent of “BookTok,” the book community on TikTok. This increased consumption of books coincided with an interest in secondary learning experiences through the related community of “StudyTok,” which encouraged intensive studying and perfecting one’s academic environment. As a result there was increased visibility of the dark academia trend from the platform, offering a vicarious experience for students deprived of in-person academic life.

Tropes and subgenres

The dark academia genre is built on a niche subset of tropes, common literary devices and themes that are shared across various works to develop character dynamics, relationships, and plots. Readers can identify a work of dark academia by the following tropes and related subgenres:

Notable works and authors

Along with Tartt’s The Secret History, some of the most notable works of the dark academia subculture are Dead Poets Society (1989) by N.H. Kleinbaum, If We Were Villains (2017) by M.L. Rio, and Babel (2022) by R.F. Kuang.

Classic works of literature can be considered dark academia, but they can also serve as a reference within and a creative catalyst for contemporary dark academia works. Canonical authors include Homer, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.D. Salinger, Albert Camus, Sylvia Plath, and Jeffrey Eugenides.

A key difference between classic and contemporary works of dark academia is that the latter feature plots that reflect a wider variety of audiences and tastes. Dark academia fiction is also often entangled with other genres such as fantasy, thriller, romance, and young adult fiction. Landmark titles of the early 21st century include:

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) by Susanna Clarke
• Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Night Circus (2011) by Erin Morgenstern
• The Song of Achilles (2011) by Madeline Miller
• The Raven Boys (2012) by Maggie Stiefvater
• Vicious (2013) by V.E. Schwab
• Truly Devious (2018) by Maureen Johnson
• Bunny (2019) by Mona Awad
• Ninth House (2019) by Leigh Bardugo
• A Deadly Education (2020) by Naomi Novik
• Legendborn (2020) by Tracy Deonn
• Piranesi (2020) by Susanna Clarke
• These Violent Delights (2020) by Micah Nemerever
• Mexican Gothic (2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Ace of Spades (2021) by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé
• In My Dreams I Hold a Knife (2021) by Ashley Winstead
• The Maidens (2021) by Alex Michaelides
• The Atlas Six (2022) by Olivie Blake
• A Study in Drowning (2023) by Ava Reid
• The Will of the Many (2023) by James Islington
• Blood Over Bright Haven (2023) by M.L. Wang
• Katabasis (2025) by R.F. Kuang