Hair-raising themes

An outrageous hair contest (including Lubin Family Professor Mary Crone, as a space alien) was just the lunchtime entertainment. This year’s senior-week faculty symposium also covered some serious academic ground, with twelve talks probing the sociology, chemistry, cultural symbolism, evolution, and even mathematics of hair.
Organizer Penny Jolly, an art historian, lined up such presenters as anthropologist Gerald Erchak on human evolution and body hair, chemist Vasantha Narasimhan on hair in Hindu mythology, mathematician Una Bray on braid theory, astronomer Mary Crone on comets (a word whose source is kometes, long-haired), poet Jay Rogoff on hair erotica in Donne’s “The Relic,” Michelle Blocklin ’02 and sociologist Susan Walzer on the power politics of hair, chemist Raymond Giguere on forensic testing of hair, and medievalist Kate Greenspan ’75 on the meaning of hair for martyrs of the middle ages. —SR