The credit for this thought spiral goes to Cinzia Du Bois (aka Lady of the Library on YouTube) and her recent video, Why Romanticising Studying Won’t Save You. In it, she critiques the social media trend of romanticising study routines, especially through aesthetic concepts like “Light Academia” and “Dark Academia”. These come complete with visual filters, fashion styles, curated planners, neat note-taking systems and various other tools. I should know, I am writing this blog originally on Notion, which, I will not deny, has some aesthetic to it (and so does this website).

I, too, have found occasional comfort in “Study With Me” videos. They help create a kind of ambient community. But if I am being honest, what I truly want is the feeling of community without the vulnerability it demands; the feeling of connection without the need to share my mess. Watching someone study in an Oxford library while I sit in my very messy room somehow fills me with a strange sense of comfort and awe at the same time. 

What I love about Du Bois—Cinzia, not the W E B—is that she speaks from the other, messier, unfiltered side of academia. Though while we are here, let us pause and acknowledge W E B Du Bois himself, the towering anti-racist intellectual whose ideas deeply inspired our very own Indian social reformer, B R Ambedkar. Their correspondence is worth revisiting. Yet Du Bois, too, was complex. For instance, he was an advocate for Japanese imperialism, among other things and his legacy is not uniformly received around the world. He may not, therefore, resonate equally across all contexts. Back to Cinzia, there is a kind of poetic irony in her sharing that name, even as she challenges the curated performance of intellect.

Cinzia grounds her critique in the idea of the “Renaissance Man”, that ideal European figure who was equally skilled in art, science, literature, music, philosophy and politics. Women, of course, were rarely seen as thinking beings in the Middle Ages. This scholar was personified in Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and so on; the myth of a perfect man, if you ask me. And as Cinzia reminds us, these men had the privilege to immerse themselves in so many fields only because their basic needs were already met.  Just as, today, some content creators can curate an aesthetic of scholarship because their other needs—time, money, stability—are already met.

I am not a first-generation learner myself and that would make me privileged to some extent, but academia feels messy to me too. And lately, thanks to these aesthetic videos, I have caught myself yearning to read in a quiet Starbucks corner, or regretting that I didn’t “aesthetically” document my PhD or book-writing journey. But as Cinzia says, let us not pile onto our already overwhelming exhaustion the added pressure of looking scholarly while being scholarly. I could never have written a dissertation surrounded by color-coded stacks of books. My notes are scribbled and scattered. As she argues, all we really need is pen and paper, and perhaps now a computer; our scholarly capabilities should not be judged by the aesthetics of our workspace. Our research is real and that should be enough. Moreover, the image of the polished, put-together scholar was crafted by privileged white men. In that sense, simply existing in academia, especially when you come from outside that mold, is a kind of resistance in itself. Why lose out on this opportunity of resisting? To show up with your tangled thoughts and unedited drafts is a political act, one that asserts that knowledge is not always tidy. 

Still, I do appreciate what social media brings to the academic table. Even if I do not subscribe to the aesthetic, I love that it brings scholarship into our homes. It makes academia less intimidating and more accessible. And let us be honest, those Renaissance men had nothing on the business savvy academic women that I follow online today. I often take pride in keeping up with the times, especially in a field as traditional as mine (early modern history) and appreciating the use of social media is part of that. I would never want to reduce anything to simple binaries: life, especially academic life, lives in the grey zones. So even in a field as tradition-bound as ours, there is definitely a space for innovation, I would say.

There is another thread I want to pull, one that I feel requires more reflection, at least for myself. I cannot speak for my readers, but I will share these thoughts in case they spark a spiral of your own. What is the role of aesthetic imagery in academic communication, whether to drive engagement or provide visual relief? As someone trained in literary history, I have never felt the need to engage much with visuals. I have been encouraged numerous times to study Mughal paintings, but I have always found them to be elite-centric (and you could challenge this view, of course), but more importantly, I have always doubted my ability to “read” visual detail the way art historians do. Yes, they are beautiful. I remember being enthralled by classes where we projected them onto big screens. But I have often asked: why spend so much time on objects commissioned by elites, when we can engage with literature from below, and access emotions that transcend the tangible confines of art and architecture?

During my time as Associate Editor for INTACH Journal of Heritage Studies, I often found it challenging to meet the constant demand for “aesthetic imagery”. Most of the submissions treated Indian heritage through tangible forms, and there was a clear editorial pressure to make the content visually engaging. We were constantly encouraged to include “engaging imagery”, but to what end? I also remember discussing my dissertation with a guest speaker who specialised in visual research methods, and being told that images could be used as “clickbait”. That idea was almost offensive, even preposterous to me. As a literary historian, do I want my work judged by how clickable it looks.

And yet here we are, in a digital world full of colour-coded notes, perfect desk setups and curated bookshelves. I understand the appeal, and at the same time, I don’t.  I appreciate the form and its reach, but not quite the pressure that comes with it. Of course, the responsibility to resist overconsumption lies with the viewer, or so the argument goes. I myself, in order to cope, have recently started watching “underconsumption-core” videos, a genre I did not even know existed a few months ago. These, too, deserve critical scrutiny. Honestly, I think my academic colleagues would be surprised by how many of these digital subcultures I have studied, simply out of a desire to keep up with the changing world. It is like I am constantly updating my inner bibliography but not just with books, with the language of the algorithm.

Nevertheless, my writing, my notes, my desk, my stack of books remain imperfect reflections of how my mind works. In an earlier post, I described them as mirrors of my brain: chaotic, often incomprehensible. But they are also evidence of movement, however uneven. Perhaps that, too, is a kind of aesthetic, one not rooted in symmetry or polish, but in persistence. And maybe that is my real aesthetic: moving forward, with a little mess and a lot of heart.