Academic trolled for Cambridge University PhD gets literary agent

BBC News

22-02-2025

An academic who received death threats in response to her completed PhD about "the politics of smell" has been assigned both a British and American literary agent. A photo of Dr Ally Louks and her completed thesis, posted to X in November 2024, attracted viral fame when it was viewed more than 120 million times.While the The University of Cambridge supervisor said there had been a lot of positive feedback from people, her post also resulted in negative attention, misogynistic comments and even rape and death threats. Despite the online attacks she said: "I have really relished the opportunity to try to prove the value of my work among that public audience."
Since the vial post, her works have now been picked up by a British and an American literary agent who she said were "both absolutely wonderful.""It doesn't go over my head that the reason that I have all of these opportunities is because people responded to my work with such scepticism initially," she said.
Her PhD, which took three-and-a-half years to research and write, was titled "Olfactory Ethics: The politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose".It explored why some writers used language associated with smell to characterise harmful attitudes toward objects of "disgust and desire".Dr Louks told the BBC: "It speaks very strongly to disgust as the so called Foetor Judaicus which is the smell of Jews that Hitler talked about in Mein Kampf." She also spoke about how smells were also used during the transatlantic slave trade "to legitimize racism". Following the completion of her works, Dr Louks said some people on X deemed it "woke nonsense," whole others said women should not be in academia, but having babies or caring for their husbands.
Prof Andy Parker, a Master at Peterhouse College, said he had seen examples of misogyny and online attacks throughout his academic career.He said: "It's not a new phenomenon, but it's particularly strange in this case for people to pick on a very sensible academic subject... a proud post from somebody who's just made a great achievement... treated as some sort of culture war."Prof Jennifer Richards, director of studies at the college added Dr Louks had "shown how to do things differently - be kind, recognise other people's humanities and share your research". After being bombarded on X, Dr Louks said while she was an "introvert" she was "doing it to show that women in academia deserve to be here".
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