Drew Gilpin Faust

Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18 1947^[1]) is an American historian and the first female president of Harvard University. ^[2] Faust, the former Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, is also Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard.^[3][4]

Early life and career

Faust was born and raised in Clarke County, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley.^[1] She is the daughter of Catharine and McGhee Tyson Gilpin. Faust comes from a well-connected family of business and political leaders.^[5] Her great-grandfather, Lawrence Tyson, was a U. S. Senator from Tennessee during the 1920s.

Graduating from Concord Academy, Concord, Massachusetts in 1964, Faust earned her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, A.M. and Ph.D. in American Civilization at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. In the same year, she joined the Penn faculty as assistant professor of American civilization, rising to Walter Annenberg Professor of History. In 2001, she was appointed the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the successor to Radcliffe College.^[1] A specialist in the history of the South in the antebellum period and Civil War, Faust is author of five books, most notably Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, for which she won the Society of American Historians Francis Parkman Prize in 1997.

Faust is a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Humanities Center, and she serves on the educational advisory board of the Guggenheim Foundation. She is divorced from her first husband, Stephen Faust and is currently married to Charles E. Rosenberg, a historian of medicine also at Harvard.

Appointment as President of Harvard University

On June 30, 2006, then-President of Harvard Lawrence H. Summers resigned after a whirlwind of controversies (stemming partially from comments he made on a possible correlation between specific genders and success in certain academic fields). Derek Bok, who had served as President of Harvard from 1971–1991, returned to serve as an interim president until a permanent replacement could be found.

On February 8, 2007, The Harvard Crimson broke the news that Faust had been selected as the next president.[1] Following formal approval by the university's governing boards, her appointment was announced three days later.[2]

During a campus news conference on campus Faust stated, "I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago". But she also added, "I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard."^[3]

Personal life

Faust was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988. She has declined to speak with the media about her diagnosis or treatment.^[6]

Honors

• Faust was named a member of the Time 100 for 2007.
• Faust was awarded a honorary Doctorate of Human Letters from Bowdoin College in May 2007.

Selected works

• Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ISBN 978-0807855737
• Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War (University of Missouri Press, 1992) ISBN 978-0826209757
• The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Louisiana State University Press, 1982) ISBN 978-0807116067
• James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Louisiana State University Press, 1982) ISBN 978-0807112489
• A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977) ISBN 978-0812212297

References

External links

• Official website - Harvard University
• Drew Gilpin Faust ’68 to Lead Harvard - Bryn Mawr College
• First Female Harvard President Discusses Priorities and Goals - The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
• Harvard's Faust: Boundaries Remain for Women - NPR
• Steve and Cokie Roberts: A lesson from Harvard's new president editorial by Cokie Roberts and Steven V. Roberts

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