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This article describes the author's experience teaching the emerging literary genre and internet subculture called "Dark Academia" in the undergraduate classroom. The pedagogical successes and failures of this class take on new meaning when viewed in the context of the author's research on medieval manuscript culture and the reception and circulation of these books after the Middle Ages.

Portrayals of teachers, students and universities in the popular cultural texts of dark academia are far removed from the lived realities of teaching academics in the contemporary, digital, neoliberal university. Pathways educators, who teach large numbers of non-traditional students in tertiary preparation programmes mostly online, are almost completely silenced in much of popular and academic discourse about the idealised university. This paper disrupts such romanticised representations of academia through personal reflections on four well-known films aligned with dark academia subcultures: Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, The Riot Club and Mona Lisa Smile. Through their first voice writings, six pathways educators working together at a regional Australian university come together to flip the script on the fantasy academy. From six diverse origin stories, a collective voice emerges, telling a new, co-written story based on our lived experiences of teaching and learning from the underrepresented margins of the neoliberal academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The subject of this paper is the phenomenon of social media aesthetics, which can be perceived as a tool for promoting and building the image of libraries, especially in terms of merchandising. The aim of this paper is to analyse the potential of the dark academia social media trend in the promotion of academic libraries. Design/methodology/approach: The article is based on a review of the social networking sites YouTube and Instagram and an analysis of network resources using the Brand24 tool. Findings: Resources that are described by Internet users as "dark academia" are popular in social media. Dark academia as an aesthetic concept creates potential for the promotion of academic libraries, especially those that are more traditional in terms of their architecture, décor or how they offer their services. Research limitations/implications: The paper concerns a phenomenon which, although popular socially, has not yet been scientifically analysed in the literature on the subject. Since the topic is new and there is no scientific literature on it, the author had to base the paper on less standard sources of information (e.g. analysis of the content of social media). The article is a review, an introduction, as well as an invitation to further discussion. The author's aim is not to comprehensively cover this topic but only to draw attention to an interesting and rarely discussed issue that has great potential for practical activities. Practical implications: The topic has great potential for the practical improvement of the promotional activities of libraries, especially older, more traditional libraries, to create a strong and positive image on the basis of characteristics often perceived as weaknesses. Social implications: Social media services are powerful social impact tools. Showing the potential role of social media aesthetics for cultural institutions could serve to make the public more aware of the role of the proper use of social media for promotion and image building. Originality/value: The use of social media aesthetics is very rarely discussed in the subject literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recientemente se han popularizado las llamadas aesthetics en redes como TikTok e Instagram y más específicamente aquellas que evocan estilos de vida del pasado. El presente artículo trata sobre la estética Dark academia como un caso relevante de este fenómeno, cuya particularidad es ser una tendencia que ofrece una representación estética del conocimiento. El foco de esta investigación es la relación entre esta tendencia y otros fenómenos de la sociedad contemporánea. De esta manera, se establece un vínculo entre la Dark academia y la cultura retrospectiva, la hipermodernidad y la persistencia del eurocentrismo en el pensamiento occidental, de modo que sea posible realizar una comprensión detallada sobre la forma en que se estetiza el conocimiento.

Este artículo busca realizar una primera aproximación a la comunidad estética Dark Academia, que adquirió una amplia popularidad durante la pandemia. Asimismo, se explora su relación con el fandom de la novela The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992). Para llevar a cabo el análisis, se estudian las prácticas ejercidas por los miembros de la Dark Academia en la red social Tumblr, seleccionada debido a sus múltiples posibilidades de circulación de contenido y sus facilidades de creación de comunidades. Además, el estudio se apoya en la metodología de la encuesta, realizada de manera virtual a 1000 usuarios de la comunidad estética. La intención es resaltar cómo el fandom de la obra de Donna Tartt es clave para el desarrollo y evolución de esta nueva comunidad.

Dark Academia (DA) is a vibrant online subculture centred upon readers' performances of bookishness. Practitioners create audio-visual assemblages of leather-bound books, dusty libraries, (neo)gothic university quadrangles and various poetic accoutrements. The ur-text of the aesthetic is Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992), especially its idealisation of a retrograde version of Anglo-American university life. DA mimics The Secret History's rejection of 1980s media technologies, but this spurning of contemporary media is a ruse. DA creators display great digital savvy: manipulating images and soundtracks via video-editing, choosing tagging vocabularies to maximise discoverability, and optimising posting times in order to game a platform's algorithm. Hence digital media makes possible the existence of DA but simultaneously "dare[s] not speak its name"—a paradox here dubbed "digital denialism". The article exemplifies the potential of combining literary-studies close-reading with media-studies methods of content analysis and attention to medial specificity. It extends Jessica Pressman's concept of "bookishness" to demonstrate how English studies can adapt to engage with the life of books online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dark academia is an 'internet aesthetic,' an aesthetic style used in posts on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Tumblr that resonates the atmosphere of life in boarding schools, prep schools, and (Ivy League) colleges from the last decades of the nineteenth century up until the 1940s. It expresses a fascination with (neo-)gothic architecture; with tweed, lace, wool, and leather; with literature and art, and Romantic longing. Having been a main trend on social media platforms throughout the coronavirus pandemic, dark academia captures and facilitates cultural engagement in times of social isolation and closed college campuses. This article studies the dark academia aesthetic as a mnemonic curatorial practice with tendencies to counter hegemonic norms and narratives. Focusing on the affective dimensions of dark academia, this article argues that the aim of this internet aesthetic is to annul historical distance by capturing a mood and atmosphere associated with early twentieth-century campuses through the means of curated social media representations. This de-historicization allows for the renegotiation of values, like inscribing queerness – associated with secret queer romantics at gender-divided schools – into its representational language, without having to reassert historical gender binaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dark academia is a fandom-created genre that draws on campus novels and thriller murder mysteries and extrapolates its aesthetic affects from the Gothic. At the heart of dark academia is a story set in a nostalgic academic fantasy that involves murder, a close-knit group of students who are obsessed with each other and detrimentally absorbed in their intellectual pursuits. Using nostalgia theory, I argue that the genre's theme of darkness in tandem with its affects of nostalgia operate as simulacra for the anxieties experienced in academia and on campuses, specifically for its student body. Dark academia as a genre is a reaction to the political threats to the humanities education, which stands for a reification of the value of a more classical education for the love of learning. But, at the same time, while some bathe academia in a nostalgic light, others have criticized how dark academia turns a blind eye to structural issues inherent in academia for generations. However, dark academia is a contemporary genre that quickly evolves in response to those criticisms. By tracing the history of dark academia and its canon development over the years, I examine how dark academia self-critiques campus nostalgia and unveils the academy's history of violence against women and racism against people of colour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual aestheticization of literature on TikTok has been trending during the last couple of years. The videos encountered by users are color-coded and equipped with light filters, and book covers included into these videos have similar designs. This gives rise to increasingly popular aesthetic trends on the platform, such as “dark academia aesthetic” or “cottage core aesthetic.” While these trends did not necessarily originate in the field of literature, each of them is centered around a work of fiction that incorporates the defining elements of the trend. In the case of ‘dark academia’, The Secret History by Donna Tartt serves as the central piece for the trend. Both BookTok and the dark academia trend gained noticeable popularity during the first wave of the 2020 COVID pandemic. This popularity is understandable as the isolation and suddenly imposed change in lifestyles left people craving for some meaningful reading experiences. The article describes and contextualizes the main elements of the trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary meme format of "parallel posts" or "web weaving" on microblogging website Tumblr emerged from intersecting fandom and bookish communities in the late 2010s, rising with the fandom-cum-subculture Dark Academia. Parallel posts are an acute symptom of a digital literary culture defined by excess of content, filtered through Tumblr's aesthetic norms as a hub of transformative fandom. Parallel posts both represent and reject the norms of bookishness on other platforms, granting insight into the conflicting impulses of media engagement in the digital age, caught between consumption and rumination. Parallel posts are a resurgence of the commonplace book or quote-collection journal; both forms are technologies of the self, practices of self-transformation and self-expression. At a moment in which the relationship between literature and digital media is in flux, parallel posts and Dark Academia demonstrate the spread of literature into a wholly transtextual, transmedial frame, grounded in both personal expression and in fandom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]