Your PhD thesis on the politics of smell made you a target for online hate - how did you feel when you were receiving so much vitriol?

Mentally, I was unscathed, as the harsh criticisms of my work had no basis in reality, since they were based on the title and abstract of my thesis alone, and many of them were misreadings in any case. I was concerned by the scale of the vitriol, however. It was clear that the response went far beyond me as an individual.

Many of the responses to your work expressed the idea that academics, particularly women in the humanities, don’t ‘live in the real world’. Do you think that there’s a prominent cultural gap between those in academia and the rest of the world? If so, how can we go about bridging that?

I think the notion that academics don’t live in the real world is rooted in a misunderstanding of the precarity of academia, particularly for early career academics, but increasingly for everyone in academia as the sector continues to see funding cuts. It is certainly worth acknowledging that students and academics at institutions like Cambridge have access to resources that others don’t, and we still have some ways to go before we reach equality in who is able to access these spaces, but it is senseless making assumptions about a person’s background and lifestyle from the very limited information available to us online!

“I’m a really strong advocate for public libraries, which offer access to trustworthy resources regardless of income”

Do you think that the anti-intellectualism which was rife in the backlash against you has worsened in recent years?

I think this is clearly the case, particularly in parts of the world where leaders are seeking to systematically undermine the credibility of academic institutions and control their output, such as the States. The internet is a global community and many of the vitriolic comments on my initial post were made by those from outside of the UK.

The responses to your work have been both positive and negative. The internet provides access to new ideas in a way that hasn’t existed before. Yet, it is also a cesspit for anti-intellectualism. Do you think, overall, the internet is a net positive or net negative in this regard?

Part of the problem is that it is difficult for people to know who to trust on the internet; it is challenging to know who is appropriately credentialed, and access to academic resources on trusted platforms is very often limited and sometimes written in a way that is inaccessible for public audiences. This latter point is not an inherently bad thing; we have academic terminology for a reason, but I also think it is important that we translate work for public audiences to better democratise learning. Certainly the internet can be a force for good and can facilitate the wide and free dissemination of accurate information, but it can also do the opposite, so I tend to put my trust in books where possible. That’s why I’m a really strong advocate for public libraries, which offer access to trustworthy resources regardless of income.

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