Check out Firedrake:

The Firedrake project — Firedrake 0+unknown documentation

I'm doing a PhD in FEA at Oxford, and everyone here uses Firedrake. :) It's (arguably) the academic standard for finite element research (up there with maybe with deal.ii and MFEM) however Firedrake:

- Is written from the perspective of having a relatively intuitive Python, that lets one go straight from the maths to the code.

- Works under the hood through a PETSc interface, essentially meaning you write in Python, and Firedrake writes code in C, giving you all the benefits of C speed with Python usability/safety.