When Ally Louks finally completed her PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge in November, she posted a quick photo of herself on X (formerly Twitter) — mainly to let people know she had completed her thesis defense and was open for work as post-doctoral researcher. “Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone,” she wrote in the post, which included a snapshot of her thesis, titled Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.
“I noticed it was gaining traction as soon as I posted it,” Louks tells Rolling Stone in a zoom from her home in England. “But I didn’t know that it was going to get out of hand until probably 48 hours in, when I started to see a couple of quite vicious comments. I thought, ‘Oh no, it’s moving over to the wrong side of the platform.’ And so it did.”
Louks, 27, was derided by right-wing posters, who called her thesis leftist garbage, woke nonsense, and proof of academia’s uselessness. It was such a swift, aggressive, and misogynistic pile-on that even people with no knowledge or interest in academia soon came to Louks’ defense — posting thousands of tweets congratulating her and defending her work against the backlash. The original post quickly grew to over 126 million views on X, as people continued to send both vitriol and praise. Louks, who before that day rarely posted, managed to ride the line between artful defense of her thesis topic itself and good natured rejoinders at the attention.
It’s been four months since Louks’ posted a picture of her PhD online, in that time, she’s gone from an unfortunate Twitter main character of the day to the definitive online commentator of smell. See a popular post about smells and there’s a good chance the comments are filled with people tagging Louks like an olfactory Bat Signal. What’s unique about this moment isn’t the virality of Louk’s initial post, but how she’s taken the attention and created an internet presence ruled by curiosity, learning, and earnestness. Louks feels like a voice from a long-forgotten age of the internet. And through it all, she just keeps posting.
“I always wanted to share my work with a public audience, and I had been randomly gifted one. Obviously the reason that the post became such a viral phenomenon was because it was a kind of locus for the culture wars,” Louks says. “But I really relish being challenged. And I think academia is a process where you’re constantly learning more, constantly being humbled. So I wanted to prove the value of my work to the people who were willing to listen and the people who were willing to approach it with curiosity and openness.”
As far back as Louks can remember, English literature has been part of her life. She has fond memories of re-reading Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five children’s adventures series and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. But Louks says she first got interested in the field during her undergraduate studies at the University of Exeter when she took a creative writing module and focused her final project on the “literary qualities” of perfume marketing. “I fell completely in love with smell studies and was fascinated by how it applied to so many different things. Although almost all of us have a sense of smell, it’s amazing that we don’t think very critically about it. So olfactory experiences diffuse their way into culture so broadly, but it tends to go unnoticed,” she says. “I just thought there’s so much to be said here, actually. And then I never stopped talking about it.”
Louks, who lost her sense of smell for 18 months after getting Covid-19, has a fondness for discussing different smells. (Her personal favorites are vanilla, fresh garden sage, and the scent of hot fudge being poured out to cool.) But much of Louk’s presence on X has been using the basic tenets of her thesis to combat cultural assumptions and biases surrounding smell online. Many viral rage bait or engagement farming accounts make racist attacks on people of color by saying they smell to imply low class or status — which in the past few weeks is basically asking for Louks to artfully ratio the post. When I ask Louks if she considers herself a bonafide smell influencer, it’s clear she’s not too sure of the title yet. “Ally Louks, smell influencer, first of her name,” she giggles. “It’s a weird situation to be in and a little surreal, but it’s wonderful to get to talk about my speciality. To live is to smell. We’re constantly emitting smells, breathing in smells, and making judgments about smells. It’s just that that process is so often unconscious. So once people become aware of it, they start to think, ‘Oh, actually, there’s something to be said here.’”
What can’t be understated is the cultural atmosphere where Louks got her fame. Since Elon Musk purchased X, the social media platform has prioritized some of the loudest, farthest-right voices promoting misogyny and anti-intellectualism. Louks, an accomplished woman with a degree and the audacity to be proud of it, was a natural target. In February, Rhianna Garrett, a PhD candidate from Loughborough University, which is also in England, posted about finishing her doctorate alongside a photo of her thesis, and received the same vitriol as Louks, perhaps intensified because Garrett is a woman of color and her work is titled The Architecture of Whiteness: How Institutional Whiteness Shapes Academic Careers in the U.K. It got 9 million views.
X rewards accounts and voices with the loudest, rudest, and often thoughtless of purposefully anti-intellectual statements to make, whether it’s about race, class, creed, or gender. So to have a bright new voice whose platform is maintained with academic rigor, while challenging inflammatory and racist statements feels like a gift that X, frankly, doesn’t deserve. Louks is continuing her academic work, which includes teaching undergraduate classes at Cambridge, writing a book, and finding funding for a project on the impact of smell disorders. But combating the internet’s fear of thinking critically might be the biggest challenge of all — one she’s trying to push back against with every post.
“With the rise of this specific brand of fascism, especially in the States, we have seen a rise in anti-intellectualism,” she says. “That affects the arts and humanities the most because those are the subjects that encourage us to think critically about the social messaging that we are surrounded by at all times. It is very much in the best interests of those in power to ensure that citizens don’t question authority. The humanities have a very significant role in combating that kind of ideology. And the kind of meticulous defunding and denigrating of the humanities should be met with skepticism. Let’s make critical thinking cool again.”
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