Last week, Ally Louks (now Dr. Louks), an academic at the University of Cambridge, posted a picture of herself on the social media site X with her fresh PhD thesis titled “Olfactory Ethics: The politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose”. The post received a surprising amount of attention – it has been viewed more than 100 million times, and has attracted over 11,000 responses.
Although most of it was apparently benign, a large proportion was misogynistic and hateful – including death threats. It highlights the hazards for academics engaging with the public, especially on topics with a political dimension, and even more so while being female.
