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Dr Ally Louks celebrated this success on her social media handle and shared that she passed the viva with no corrections.
Cambridge University rallied behind Dr Louks. (Photo Credit: Instagram)
Cambridge University has defended one of its teachers, Dr Ally Louks, whose PhD on the “Politics of Smell” has unleashed a storm of controversy and trolling. Dr Louks recently completed her dissertation entitled Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose, about the representation of scent in literature and the way it informs social hierarchies pertaining to gender, race, class and species. In response to the trolling, Cambridge University took to Instagram to show support for Dr Louks.
The University wrote: “The attention that Ally’s achievement received turned to harassment and misogyny when trolls attacked Ally’s PhD topic, her education, her achievement, and her gender.” It added: “Dr. Louks, we support you” as it pledged continued support for its students both online and offline.
Amid the trolling, Dr Louks reported receiving threats of sexual violence and harassment through social media platforms, BBC reports. She described her experience as intense but said she felt relatively untroubled by the hostility directed at her, attributing much of the criticism to societal expectations about how women should behave. “It’s definitely been overwhelming and an unusual week for someone who is typically a bookish introvert who doesn’t really like attention but I feel quite unfazed by the vitriol,” she told the news channel.
Background of the Controversy
Dr Louks celebrated this success on her social media handle and shared that she passed the viva with no corrections. Her thread was quickly beset by a wave of horrible comments and ridicule. Many said it was an irrelevant topic, or the concept sounded like some sort of gimmick; others questioned how putting olfactory themes into literature would be regarded as a good enough subject to study.
Despite the backlash, the work by Dr Louks enjoyed many defendants who pointed out the innovation of her approach against the conventionally overlooked domains of human perception. According to them, much about society can be revealed through the language that describes odours.
The research Dr Louks conducted relates to how literature navigates through complex social dynamics using the sense of smell in language. Her first chapter specifically speaks to how smell indicates class divisions, drawing upon works from writers such as George Orwell. The abstract of her dissertation broadly outlines that she had wished to study, in general, olfactory oppression in literature and what the effect would be for various kinds of power systems within society.
