In the Shadow of Ivory Towers: The Enduring Appeal of Dark Academia (PEN America World Voices Festival 2026)
The hallowed halls of academia have long captured the imaginations of writers. With their exclusivity, insularity, and at times cultish devotion to knowledge, they lend themselves to richly drawn atmospheres of darkness and mystery and incisive explorations of access, adolescence, and power. In Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, magically...