The Uncomfortable Lightness of Dark Academia

I first learned about Zoe B. Wallbrook’s debut novel, History Lessons, from a promotional email a few weeks after it came out. Its blurb’s opening line blew my mind a little: “As a newly minted junior professor, Daphne Ouverture spends her days giving lectures on French colonialism, working on her academic book, and going on atrocious dates.” When her “superstar” colleague Sam Taylor is found dead in the fictional college town of Calliope, Daphne, a Harrison University history professor, gets drawn into the murder investigation. She eventually cracks the case while uncovering more and more of Sam’s—and the university’s—secrets and lies.

The algorithm had really outdone itself this time. Instead of pitching me the usual gendered slop of anti-aging serums and intermittent fasting plans, the monetized ether was recommending a page-turner about a Black woman scholar of France and empire to a real-life, nonwhite woman scholar of France and empire who still remembers what it was like to be “newly minted,” and has certainly gone on her share of atrocious dates. And the author of History Lessons is a Black woman and a professional historian herself (more on this later). Part campus novel, part murder mystery, part romance, the book promised to cross and diversify genres typically dominated by male and/or white characters and authors. I rushed to get my hands on a copy.

At a moment when working in higher education often feels like being strapped into a driverless Tesla with tires that keep slashing themselves, it can take multiple fictions to get through the day: I haven’t assigned my class too much reading, my institution isn’t a deranged corporation, I will be able to afford to retire before I die, et cetera. For several entertaining hours, History Lessons pulled me into a world I could both escape and relate to. I have never before encountered a novel with a lead character as easy to identify with as Daphne when it comes to the ways race and gender have shaped—and messed with—my own academic career. To be clear, I am South Asian, not Black, and I have no idea what it is like to face misogynoir in its various unforgivable forms within and beyond the university. But, like Daphne, I have had the experience of being mistaken for other (in my case) brown women in my department, at my school, and in my field. I also understand feeling and being treated as though I am too young, too female, and/or too brown to be a professor. And I am still, more often than seems right in 2026, the only nonwhite person—or one of very few nonwhite people—in meetings, on committees or conference panels, and at some large professional gatherings.

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Saboteurs in the Modern Academy

Sophia Booth Magnone

It is a powerful thing to feel seen by a book, especially for those of us who find ourselves again and again on the receiving end of other people’s ignorance and privileged nonsense. Featuring a protagonist with Ivorian and Creole roots, History Lessons leans into diversity and inclusion in its portrayal of Daphne’s family, friends, students, and the community around Harrison University. Daphne’s Korean American and South Asian American “besties,” Elise and Sadie (a lesbian), are beautiful, witty, highly accomplished emerging scholars in their respective fields. Asma Ahmed, the lead detective in Sam’s murder investigation, is a tough, attractive Iraqi American mother of three. Wallbrook’s attention to the perspectives of women from immigrant and nonwhite backgrounds; the mention of foods, languages, and clothing from multiple cultures; and her cheeky depiction of those awkward-to-offensive interactions with white colleagues who sometimes make not-great assumptions about who you are and what you’re capable of—these things all made History Lessons a fun and also cathartic ride for this first-generation academic child of Indian Muslim parents who became a historian in a predominantly white field like French history.

Reading Wallbrook’s novel reminded me of watching The Chair, Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman’s short-lived 2021 Netflix series. Throughout The Chair’s six episodes focused on lit professor Ji-Yoon Kim’s (Sandra Oh) brief stint as the first woman and nonwhite chair of Pembroke University’s English Department, I could not help but relate to Ji-Yoon and other characters. I felt my own past and present disappointments and anger stirred up by the gendered and racial discrimination they confront; the clashes between professional ranks and generations; the push and pull between integrity and compromise that can run through—and over—an academic career; and the sometimes funny, but also painful, scenes when characters learn (again) that the institution won’t love them back.

Like Ji-Yoon and her women colleagues, Daphne and friends must negotiate the misogyny and racism of an institutional and professional landscape still littered with the type of white man who accumulates career successes by leaning on, and even diminishing, the labor of marginalized and precarious coworkers, or otherwise behaving dreadfully. While Ji-Yoon contends with a controversy over academic freedom and cancel culture in The Chair, Daphne gets caught up in solving the murder of a “golden boy” whose critical work on the prison-industrial complex made him a professional and media darling, adding public acclaim to base layers of straight, white, cis male privilege.

Both The Chair and History Lessons have some hilarious scenes that seem like they could only be truly appreciated by an academic audience. Who else can really understand the ups and downs of undergraduate and graduate teaching, the wild absurdity of some faculty meetings, and the many ways scholars in one discipline find to throw shade on those in another, especially in the humanities? The Chair and Wallbrook’s novel also share a desire to take up some of academia’s most serious concerns: diversity, equity, and inclusion; the politics of university administration, private funding, and public relations; sexual and other forms of misconduct. In interviews, Wallbrook has identified a range of influences, including old-school mystery authors like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and P. G. Wodehouse; Amanda Cross’s classic campus mystery, Death in a Tenured Position (1981); and romance fiction by queer authors and authors of color who feature diverse characters in their work.¹ Reviews have remarked on the novel’s moves between moods and genres, from humorous workplace drama to detective story to feel-good female-friend-group fiction to romance, and back again. Light and upbeat in some ways, History Lessons also deals with disturbing subject matter—murder, stalking, assault, and rape—making it a departure from the less explicitly violent crime scenarios of the “cozy mystery.” This has prompted some reviewers to issue warnings to readers who might find the book’s heavier content distressing.² There is perhaps a whole other essay to write about how History Lessons handles sexual violence in particular, especially in relationship to recent campus fictions like Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt (2025), or Netflix’s Vladimir (2026), in which sexual predation is a driver of narrative tension, intrigue, and satire.

History Lessons meets a seemingly insatiable market demand for fantasies of school and university life featuring run-of-the-mill humans, but also superheroes, mutants, outcasts, witches, vampires, fairies, and more. In their introduction to a 2022 cluster of essays published by the online journal Post45, Olivia Stowell and Mitch Therieau identify “dark academia” as “an online subculture, a constellation of spaces … dedicated to a certain idea of the (typically midcentury) fashion and material culture of elite universities and their wealthy students,” and “a burgeoning literary” category of “campus-intrigue … novels, which remix tropes from the gothic, the detective novel, and other genres.”³ According to Stowell and Therieau, dark academia can be an aesthetic, a publishing label, a vibe, and a structure of feeling. Wallbrook’s novel fits the bill in more ways than one, offering up some favored elite campus clichés: hallowed halls, impressive art and library collections, and even a secret reading room! The puzzles Daphne has to solve to find Sam’s killer tick several dark academia boxes, feeding the fetish for old books and buildings, coded messages, and risky, but thrilling, intra- and extracurricular adventures.

As a career academic, I cannot speak to how History Lessons hits for readers who have not spent many years studying, and then working, at a university. For this professional historian, however, the book offered more than familiar characters who validated some of my own experiences. Wallbrook’s novel also expresses other wishes, some of these tied to profound inequities and injustices that can make academic life frustrating, demoralizing, and heartbreaking. In History Lessons, a professor can teach their classes, get all their admin done, do stellar research, land “a contract with a top university press,” win prestigious fellowships, and become indispensable to the type of complex criminal investigation in shows some of us can only binge-watch to avoid our grading. In History Lessons, books, reading, and research skills all matter deeply, not just on campus, but in “the real world.” Daphne is a natural detective and her ability to find, analyze, and interpret evidence in context—these historian’s skills are what make the book’s crucial revelations possible. In History Lessons, a young, nonwhite, woman prof can rock, and ultimately tip, the boat, securing the prestigious job she already has and be offered a job she didn’t even apply or interview for at another elite institution when a benevolent senior colleague makes a call or two on her behalf. The backup school? Stanford. In History Lessons, a single woman in academia can enjoy a meet-cute over murder with a shockingly well-read, gentle-giant ex-detective turned bookseller who has “renounced policing as a public good” but still has the chops to work a case if duty calls.

The novel also does something for the reader interested in retribution. In History Lessons, people get what they deserve. Wallbrook’s “light” fiction is sitting on a heap of inequality, injustice, and rage, a word and feeling that pops up several times.⁴ By the end of the novel, the good characters prevail, finding closure, professional success, and love. The villains have their misdeeds exposed and reputations destroyed, losing positions of power and, in some cases, facing criminal charges. Two of them pay for their wrongdoing with their very lives. Asked in one interview where she got the idea for the novel, Wallbrook said she was inspired by a colleague in her real academic life who does “noble” work but is “such an asshole.”⁵ Writing a novel that starts out with a homicide is definitely one way to release your feelings about the kind of workplace troll who sucks the oxygen out of every room they enter. Identification can be cathartic, and so can revenge. Indeed, History Lessons got me thinking about how not only reading, but also writing this type of fiction, might help me cope with the worst aspects of my job.

Wallbrook’s fictional academia is rife with bad power dynamics and people. It is also one in which the excellence of a diverse cast of characters rises to the top like cream every time. Daphne is not just extremely clever; she is fabulous at everything. She is good-looking, charming, has a photographic memory, can bake a delicious cake and cook up a mean Ivorian peanut stew. She speaks a beautiful “Parisian” French, and is a nurturing and supportive faculty member, friend, daughter, and potential romantic partner. In fact, all the nonwhite characters in this novel are super talented, lovely people. This made relating to any of them a little tricky at moments. The book’s white characters, on the other hand … Sam, the murdered social justice crusader, turns out to be an unethical, violent predator—in Daphne’s words, “a human dumpster fire.” His fiancée, Molly Henderson; Ken Miller, Daphne’s dean at Harrison; Andrew Westmount, the architect of the prison corruption Sam planned to expose before he died—all of these white characters prove to be terrible individuals. The History Department’s chair, Miranda Nurse, and Rowan Peterson, Daphne’s bookish ex-detective crush, seem to be the only white characters in the novel who have Daphne’s, or anyone else’s, best interest at heart.

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Reviews

Dark Academia Grows Up

Elyse Graham

This reader did not need Daphne to be such a unicorn, or for the divide between good and evil in the book to be the chasm it appears. Sometimes the novel feels like a send-up or critique of the forms of academic hierarchy and privilege that depend on and perpetuate so much that is wrong with Harrison University and higher education as a whole these days. But History Lessons ultimately goes in big for the things that set “prestigious” schools apart, including the illusion that the best people get the best jobs at the best places. Most academics do not work at institutions like Harrison, or Pembroke, but schools like them are so often the settings for popular stories about the work we do. It was hard to read History Lessons and not be reminded of Bill Readings’s 1996 lament, more relevant today than ever, that “excellence … has become the unifying principle of the contemporary University,” a fiction that does more damage than good.⁶

It is heartening that, over the course of History Lessons’s 36 chapters, Daphne ditches the quiet life, keeping her “head down,” and “the mantra she’d wrapped around herself like a thick down comforter through grad school. ‘Don’t go looking for drama.’” Instead, she chooses to speak up and fight back, and she wins. At the same time, Daphne’s, the novel’s, and the author’s politics are mysteries that persist for me. Apart from the commitment to excellence, there is something jarring about a cops-on-campus romance that represents the police as an inclusive, sensitive presence in and around a university in the contemporary United States. Daphne works closely with law enforcement in ways that make sense because of who “the police” are in this novel: a woman of color and a white, male ex-cop abolitionist who also loves Toni Morrison. It helps that Daphne’s teddy bear of a father is ex-CIA. The critique of prisons, the focus of Sam’s work, seems promising at the start of the book but fizzles a bit by the end when Sam’s own unspeakable acts eclipse the scandal he was investigating, and a few other characters get taken away … to jail. Asked about her novels’ consistently happy endings, the bestselling Irish author Marian Keyes has explained, “I like to end my books at the moment where everything is okay … It doesn’t mean that it will always be like that because it won’t.”⁷ History Lessons ends happily for the characters readers come to care about most. Daphne and Rowan are surviving months apart by sending each other books in an impossibly cute long-distance lead-up to what is sure to be an exciting new chapter of both of their lives. Miranda gets promoted; Elise gets engaged. There is hope for the future of Harrison University. Wallbrook has indicated that this novel is the first of a planned series. While I understand that fictional academic worlds are not beholden to the one where I live, I cannot help but find myself hoping the next book pushes the envelope on the politics and interrogates some of the assumptions of this one.