Faust, Drew Gilpin

Faust, Drew Gilpin (Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust), 1947–, American historian and educator, b. New York City, grad. Bryn Mawr (B.A. 1968), Univ. of Pennsylvania (M.A. 1971, Ph.D. 1975). A professor of history at the Univ. of Pennsylvania from 1976 to 2000, she has written several works on the antebellum and Civil War South, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1997), which won the Francis Parkman Prize, and This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), which won the Bancroft Prize. In 2001 she became the first dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and oversaw the transformation of the former Radcliffe College into a multidisciplinary center for scholarly and creative work. Also a professor of history at Harvard from 2001, Faust was named president of the university in 2007, becoming the first woman to hold (2007–18) the post.

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