Drew Gilpin Faust, an eminent historian and outstanding academic leader is the twenty-eighth president of Harvard University.
Education:
Raised in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Faust went on to attend Concord Academy in Massachusetts. She received her bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and her master's degree (1971) and doctoral degree (1975) in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.
Personal:
Faust is married to Charles Rosenberg, one of the nation's leading historians of medicine and science, who is Professor of the History of Science and Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard. Faust and Rosenberg live in Cambridge. They have two daughters, Jessica Rosenberg, a 2004 summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College, and Leah Rosenberg, Faust's stepdaughter, a scholar of Caribbean literature.
Background:
Before coming to Harvard, Faust served for 25 years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She was appointed as assistant professor in the Department of American Civilization in 1976, associate professor in 1980, and full professor in 1984. She was named the Stanley Sheerr Professor of History in 1988, then served as the Annenberg Professor of History from 1989 to 2000. She chaired the Department of American Civilization for five years, and was director of the Women's Studies Program from 1996 to 2000. She was twice honored at Penn for her distinguished teaching, in 1982 and 1996.
While at Penn, Faust served on a broad array of university committees, in such areas as academic planning and budgets, academic freedom, human resources, the university archives, and intercollegiate athletics. She was a member of Penn's presidential search committee in 1993-94 and chaired the presidential inaugural committee in 1994. From 1988 to 1990 she chaired the President's Committee on University Life, which addressed such issues as diversity on campus, interaction among faculty, students, and staff, and Penn's relations with its neighboring community.
Since 2001 Faust served as the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. As dean of Radcliffe, Faust has been an influential member of Harvard's Academic Advisory Group, which brings together the president, provost, and deans to consider matters of university policy. A devoted teacher and mentor, she is currently leading an undergraduate seminar on the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the spring of 2005, she oversaw the work of Harvard's Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering. In 2004, she served on the Allston Task Force on Undergraduate Life.
Since coming to Harvard, Faust has continued to write and lecture on the history of the American South and the Civil War. Her sixth book, This Republic of Suffering, forthcoming in 2008, considers the impact of the Civil War's enormous death toll on the lives of nineteenth-century Americans. Her fifth book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996), was awarded the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, honoring the year's best nonfiction book on an American theme.
