Dr. Ally Louks went viral after announcing on X that she had passed her viva (the oral examination at the end of a PhD) with no corrections and had therefore been awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

The post, which featured a photo of Louks holding her bound thesis with the caption “Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone,” received over 117 million views, 249,000 likes, 21,100 reposts, and 11,000 comments.

After sharing her success, Louks quickly became a victim of trolling, with various users questioning the academic legitimacy of her work.

One X user claimed that “Academia is dead”, while another X user wrote in her comments section: “To what extent was your PhD subsidized by taxpayers, and when do you plan demanding that middle-class Americans working trades jobs pay off your student loans?”, despite the fact Louks’ BA, Masters, and PhD have all been completed at British universities.

Louks received an email, in which an anonymous sender abused her and threatened sexual violence against her.

She posted the screenshot of the email on X, along with the caption: “To be clear, this is where I draw the line. This is abhorrent and illegal and no one should ever have to deal with this.” Louks confirmed that she had reported the email to the police.

Louks told Varsity that her original post to X had “gained a lot of traction” within the first 24 hours, and said that “the comments were really kind and celebratory.”

She explained, “It was only after the post was retweeted by a couple of right-wing accounts that the post gained negative attention.”

Regarding these negative comments, Louks said: “The threats, slurs, and vitriol were abundant, but they felt baseless and cowardly.”

She described the amount of internet attention she has received as “uncomfortable”, though added that “it has been extremely gratifying to receive so much positive interest in my work”.

Louks said that the positive comments she has received “far outweigh” the negative ones, stating: “Thousands of people across a variety of platforms have expressed their desire to read my work.”

She added that hundreds of people have requested to view her thesis on Apollo, the University’s institutional repository, though it is currently embargoed.

Considering the reasons for which her thesis in particular has attracted so much attention, Louks said that, “somewhat unfathomably,” her post on X “became a locus for people with different conceptions of the value of academia, the value of attending to oppression in society, and the value of women more generally, to discuss their opinions.”

Louks’ thesis is titled: “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.” The abstract states: “This thesis studies how literature registers the importance of olfactory discourse—the language of smell and olfactory imagination it creates—in structuring our social world.”

It adds that the “broad aim” of the thesis is “to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures.”

Louks claims she has seen countless misinterpretations of her thesis online, but says that “a careful reading” of the abstract she has publicised “invalidates each one of them”.

Louks hopes that a key takeaway from the debates surrounding her work can be that “Interacting with those who disagree with you in a calm, restrained, and polite manner is often far more effective than knee jerk responses.”

She also hopes that people will be “more alert” to the role of smell in literature, saying that “it would be good to have more interlocutors!”

The University of Cambridge has since published a statement expressing their support for Louks.