Overview

• Dr. Ally Louks, a Cambridge University graduate, completed her PhD titled 'Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose,' exploring how smell is used to shape power dynamics in literature.
• Her celebratory social media post announcing her PhD achievement garnered over 42 million views and sparked heated reactions online.
• Critics, particularly from right-leaning segments, dismissed the research as overly niche, 'woke,' or a waste of resources, with some comments becoming aggressively misogynistic.
• Supporters defended the study as a valuable academic contribution, highlighting the importance of exploring underexamined aspects of literature like scent's influence on identity and societal structures.
• The online discourse highlights broader issues of anti-intellectualism and the tendency of social media to amplify uninformed criticism of specialized academic work.