Sophie White, professor of American studies at Notre Dame, was awarded a Public Scholars grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in August in the agency’s final round of funding for the 2022 fiscal year, the University announced in a press release. 
White is a historian who studies race and othering. In 2020, she won the Frederick Douglas Book Prize, which is annually awarded for an outstanding non-fiction book published about slavery.
White will make use of this NEH fellowship — her third — for the writing of her book “Strangers Within: A Cultural and Genomic History of Red Hair.”
“The book is a global project that will examine the marginalization of red-haired individuals, across Europe to the United States, the Middle East, China and Russia and from Ancient Egypt to the modern day,” White said.
White cites Ramses the Great, the most powerful pharaoh of all time, and Shah Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty of Iran — renowned historical figures little known as redheads.
White consulted genetic experts who established red hair as a recessive trait that must be inherited from both parents.
“Certain variants in a gene named MC1R, which is located on the sixteenth chromosome, are responsible for the expression of red hair and freckles,” White said.
“What I’m trying to do with the book,” White said, “is to get a handle on genomic findings and medical studies, then map that on to all the cultural stereotypes that have been told about redheads across place and time.”
According to White, certain medical particularities are found in individuals with the red-haired gene.
“Researchers can corroborate anecdotal evidence that redheads need twenty percent more anesthetic on the whole,” White said.
White, a redhead herself, has experienced this firsthand.
“If you were to talk to the average redhead or the average dentist, they will tell you if you have a redhead, and they need an anesthetic for a tooth filling, you’d better give them additional amounts and scientific studies have confirmed that,” White said.
White called attention to several medical anomalies exhibited in redheads that differ between sexes.
For example, the somatic sensory system, or “the part of the sensory system concerned with the perception of touch, pressure, temperature and vibration seems to work differently in male and female redheads,” White said. She also noted that redheaded women are more sensitive to opioids.
White used these medical findings to inform her interpretation of the cultural history of redheads. “One of the recurring facets of discrimination against redheads is that it is variable in gendered ways,” White continued. Females, White says, are judged to be “hypersexualized,” while males are associated with “power and disorder.”
Mary Magdalene, though “never described as being a redhead in the Bible, has been portrayed with red hair in Western art history from the fourteenth century onwards,” White said. “Seth, an ancient Egyptian deity, and Thor, a Norse God, are both redheaded gods of chaos.”
“Thirteen percent of all Ashkenazi Jews are carriers of the red-haired gene,” White said. She says antisemitism has been perpetuated using redheads in artwork, like the portrayal of Judas as red-haired.
White showed concern over the failure of redhead abuse to cease in countries with high proportions of red-haired individuals.
“In Ireland, there are superstitions, such as it being bad luck for fishermen to cross a redhead on their way out to sea,” White said. Meanwhile, Scotland has the highest per capita rate of red-haired individuals in the world, yet “the places where there are the most will also single out the people among them who are redheads,” White said.
Regarding red-haired students on Notre Dame’s campus, White said: “I remember, I don’t know if they still have [one], but there was a GroupMe for redheads.”
They “discriminated against anyone they thought wasn’t redheaded enough,” White said. “Strawberry blondes or strawberry redheads, who are actual carriers of the redhead gene variant, were not necessarily allowed in the group.”
It is White’s hope that her project will let “the rest of the world know that this is serious research, not a frivolous topic.”
Professor wins grant for research on red hair
Courtesy of John
A group of Notre Dame redheads pose in front of Legends before a Notre Dame football game.
