Ally Louks was never that interested in social media before November 2024. “I’d pretty much universally avoided it,” she tells me, only downloading X when she started her PhD at Peterhouse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, after lockdown, she abandoned socials altogether. But when she finished her PhD, she felt that she ought to tell her community of smell studies and literary specialists – “I had maybe two hundred followers” – that she had completed her thesis on Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. They might need her for a project or a postdoc, she thought, so she posted a picture “with a very specific means to an end in mind”.
You might recognise that PhD title, because what happened next made national news. Louks’s post was viewed more than 130 million times and attracted over 10,000 responses. She was suddenly the locus of an anti-intellectual onslaught. Louks received rape and death threats over her “woke” topic of study, with one popular comment reading “you would have spent your years better by getting married and having children”. Plenty also told her that she is doing “nothing for the furtherance of society”. At the time, Louks said she was mentally “unscathed,” but how does she feel about the vitriolic response now?
“It’s one of our senses. Is it that niche?”
“I’m still not used to being known, that’s for sure,” says Louks with an uncomfortable laugh. “But has it changed the way I work? I think if I were to look back at some of the talks I’ve given in previous years, I’d wonder why I wasn’t being more direct. The tone and rhetoric I use is slightly different now”. The virality has had an emboldening effect on Louks. “I think I feel more strongly than ever that, for my own work specifically, I want to be making a difference. I don’t really want to be worrying away at something that nobody else could ever care about”. The viral post may have intensified this motivation, but throughout our conversation, it becomes clear that Louks has always prioritised the social conscience of her work.
Louks’s academic writing “is in her heart and soul” – it’s “always felt that way, even if that sounds a bit, well, pathetic,” she giggles. “It’s partly because smell is so misunderstood, so little understood”. Ever since she started working on smell – almost a decade ago now – she’s felt “a genuine sense of purpose” and that her work is “actually furthering knowledge”. People often comment that studying smell is “niche”, but she fights her corner: “It’s one of our senses. Is it that niche? You wouldn’t say that about any other sense”. I echo her sentiment by noting how many articles us English students read on sound: “Yeah! Sooo overrated, right?”.
Our informality begs a confession – this interview isn’t my first time meeting Ally. Before the viral PhD post, she taught my college cohort some critical theory classes on, you guessed it, smell. Ally was an endearingly eccentric supervisor. When we met, we were given a jellybean each and instructed to hold our noses while eating. Then, we were to try another, noses unblocked. Ally took a hands-on approach to teaching us that almost 80% of what we think is taste is actually smell. She remained a memorable supervisor by promising, at the start of the next supervision, to be “less weird than last time”. She remarked at the class’s close that she hadn’t quite managed it.
“I felt responsible to really understand smell because I was the first person to work on it”
This self-proclaimed weirdness has served Louks well in her current role as ‘the smell lady’ online. She’s become the internet’s resident smell-analyst, often answering people’s questions about why they feel “compelled by certain smells that are generally deemed taboo” (like their partner’s sweat, for example). “Being online adds that layer of mediation that means that people open up a little bit more, which is great, because I’m quite difficult to faze!”.
The 28-year-old’s engagement with a public audience will continue with the release of her trade book. This project is “vastly different” to her book based on her PhD thesis. Louks has been freed up to do more interdisciplinary work on smell science in the trade book, to “draw on all the learning that never made it into the thesis”. Her role on social media for the past year, she observes, has trained her “to be alive to all of the potential eyes that might be on the book”.
Returning to the subject of anti-intellectualism, I’m curious whether Louks believes that the hate she was subjected to was intensified by her role as a literary scholar, not just a researcher in the humanities. Are scholars of literature made to extensively justify themselves? “In some ways, I think literary scholars aren’t asked enough to justify themselves,” even though she doesn’t think there is anything wrong with doing work that doesn’t have a major social impetus. However the idea that all academic work is inseparable from politics is, to Louks, “a bit barking mad, especially at places like Cambridge or Oxford”.
“I couldn’t imagine my life without having done that PhD. It was an obsession of mine”
It’s an age divide, too, Louks suggests. Many academics who are further on in their careers have “never really been forced to fully justify why it is that their work is important”. But for younger academics, “it is almost impossible to get a job in academia without having a really strong argument for why your work matters”.
Louks’s devotion to her specialism is refreshing. “I couldn’t imagine my life without having done that PhD. It was an obsession of mine”. The uniqueness of her subject matter gave her not only valuable academic expertise, but a sense of duty: “I felt responsible to really understand smell because I was the first person to work on it”.
Much of Louks’s work focuses on olfactory prejudice, which refers to the othering of a person or group by commenting on their smell, often by implying that someone is disgusting, lesser-than, or animalistic. Louks details that there are “so many ways” that olfactory prejudice plays a role in society. “Being online, the thing I’ve noticed the most is the discourse surrounding smell and race,” most specifically, “smell and India”. Her thesis has a chapter that focuses on smell and anti-blackness, but when she rejoined social media: “It became immediately obvious that the prevalent sentiment was this idea that Indian bodies somehow smell worse”. It shocked her that these posts were getting tens of thousands of likes – “that disturbed me”.
“People don’t understand how demeaning it can be to have smell connected with your identity in some way”
Louks argues that we see olfactory prejudice applied “to basically anyone who is consistently maligned in contemporary culture”. Comments on smell vary from “really serious and really concerning to more silly and playful. The problem is that we don’t ever really think critically about it. People don’t understand how demeaning it can be to have smell connected with your identity in some way”.
So how does Cambridge’s own olfactory expert suggest we think more critically about smell? “There’s really not that much we can do about whether you like or dislike a smell; it’s about how you react to your feelings”. In our “sanitised culture,” Louks suggests, “there are certain situations in which it is ethically and politically valuable to resist reacting in a phobic manner. Imagine you’re sitting next to someone ungroomed or smelly on a bus. Trying to foster respect and fellow-feeling is more important than giving into your desire to be disgusted and move away.” Louks reminds us that there are some odours that we shouldn’t tolerate, since they are “genuinely harmful”. She argues that our lack of olfactory vocabulary complicates our ability to decipher which smells are actually dangerous.
Despite the thousands of commenters who turned their noses up at Louks’s thesis title, she has never once rested on her laurels. Her enduring belief in her work’s relevance has remained ever since she submitted her undergraduate dissertation on Nabokov’s Lolita with its own scent pamphlet. She’s unapologetic about her work, her introversion, and the fact that her favourite scent is vanilla (“so far from basic” if you look into its cultivation history).
One commenter on Louks’s viral post decided to quote Hamlet: “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Presumably, he was suggesting that a woman writing on olfactory ethics is some failsafe indicator of a country’s reeking corruption. Ah, a literary reference that uses smell, invoking disgust to degrade a woman’s academic achievement. How fitting. Anti-intellectuals 0, Ally Louks? 1.
