Red Hair
In Progress:
Strangers Within: A Global and Genomic History of Red Hair
Latest News: This project has been awarded a U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award
Strangers Within: A Global and Genomic History of Red Hair juxtaposes cultural history with new genomic discoveries to analyze how redheads (MC1R gene variant carriers) have been alternately glorified, marginalized and abused over a wide temporal and geographic swathe.
This has required the kind of intellectual retooling that is the hallmark of my approach to interdisciplinary research, resulting in immersion in genomics, in the history of medicine, and into truly widespread global points of cultural reference that are made more manageable by the tight focus on red hair. This book extends and deepens in fresh ways my long engagement with cultural constructions of difference. It offers, at its root, an original and sometimes stealthy way to shine a light on how hair (red) and skin (freckled) can simultaneously excite and repel, inciting fear, discrimination, violence, and adulation, on the basis of color.
One story stands out, told me by a middle-aged Dutch woman. Before her birth, her father had let it be known that he didn’t care if his baby were born male or female, he only feared it might be redhaired. She was born with flaming bright red hair. Her father shaved her head. He did so for the next six years, so that every photograph of her from early childhood shows a little girl with bald head covered by a large hat. Uncovering the reason for that story of alienation unfolding among blood relatives led me to unpack eerily similar incidences of parents hiding (protecting?) their children’s red hair, all the way to the Egyptian schoolboy I came across in Cairo, where he alone of all his classmates kept a cap firmly planted over his deep copper red hair. Red hair attracts and it repels, usually intensely, and that is the story I plan to tell.