Drew Gilpin Faust
Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947) is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, serving from 2007 to 2018. She was the first woman to serve as president of Harvard and the university’s first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard. A scholar of the American Civil War and the antebellum South, Faust has written several books on history, particularly on the social and cultural history of the Civil War.
Faust grew up in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and earned her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1968. She went on to receive her M.A. and Ph.D. in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining Harvard, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where she became a dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Her published works include "Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War" and "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War".
Selected Works
- A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South (1977)
- Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996)
- This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)
