Episode 105: The Cambridge Smell PhD

Dr. Ally Louks, a scholar at Cambridge University, created a frenzy online after posing for a selfie with her PhD thesis entitled 'Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose’.  Her tweet went viral, with over 120 million views to date. We discuss the backlash and why we think her English Literature PhD caused such a furore. Including... anti-intellectualism, envy, knowledge as something possession of a particular sex, the crisis in the American academy, and the history of conservatives in literature. Plus, what dealing with academic charlatans is like, what PhDs actually are, and why men sometimes hate something a woman does precisely because it’s excellent.