She earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Vanderbilt and a Ph.D. in French with a minor in Italian from Stanford, where she also taught as a Lecturer prior to joining the faculty of Appalachian. Darci believes that literature promotes the development of cognitive skills that people are less likely to acquire from nonliterary texts or even from lived experience. Her dissertation argued that certain fin-de-siècle writers designed their texts with this outcome in mind. Her research has also examined the the impact of visual culture on habits of reading and interpretation.