PhD Spotlight 2025 Competition Finalist

Dion Everett, MRes student in the Department of English, has been selected as a finalist for the YorkTalks PhD Spotlight competition taking place on Wednesday 15th January 2025 for his research project 'Secret Histories and Haunted Halls: Dark Academia and the Contemporary Gothic'.

Finalists have been shortlisted by a panel of experienced Research Communicators based on the Creativity, Impact, Communication and Originality in their application, and now have the opportunity to engage the general public with their research at the final. 

Dion's MA thesis is an exploration of how the recently coined 'dark academia' subgenre and its relationship to the literary canon, particularly the literatures of the classical Greek world and the Renaissance, allows us to think of it as a recent development of the Gothic genre. His research is particularly interested in the presentation of the university as a threshold for transformative experience.