In 2008, the academic job market crashed and never recovered. I know this for a very particular reason: that year I received my Ph.D. in classics from Princeton University, but most of the jobs had evaporated in the recession. Every year since, the number of jobs in the field has only grown smaller, paired most years by the announcements of closures of classics departments—and those in other humanities fields—in universities across the U.S. and the U.K.
For most people, this news is an unfortunate development, but not one to which they devote much thought. And yet, for some, this has been a life-defining tragedy. Years ago, an English professor I knew wondered, in self-reflective distress: Without academic jobs, what would happen to those who cannot imagine anything but a life spent living entirely in their heads? Enough others are pondering this question to continue filling up Ph.D. programs in the humanities each year, even as chances of employment in traditional academia now are lower than winning the lottery.
The author R.F. Kuang has clearly been thinking about this question, as she pursues a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. In case you’re wondering, there are even fewer jobs in her field than in classics. But Kuang has also done something unusual with her remarkable academic training: She has written “dark academia” fantasy novels, reflecting on the academia we know, but setting the stories in a world where magic is real, readily present, and incredibly alluring and dangerous all at once. The effect is something akin to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but set in British universities.
In Kuang’s previous novel, the bestseller Babel, the protagonists are brilliant magic and linguistics students at Oxford, trying to survive and thrive against all odds while also trying to reform an international system they find systemically unjust. Spoiler alert: They fail, but Kuang doesn’t. The novel is superb in its plot twists, character development, and the casually simple use of minutiae of different disciplines that Kuang herself has managed to master along her academic journey. Her characters are convincing academic geniuses—those people who are all book sense, but no common sense.