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Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian, college administrator, and the president of Harvard University. Faust is the first woman to serve as Harvards president and the universitys 28th president overall. Faust is the fifth woman to serve as president of an Ivy League university, and the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Faust is also Harvards first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard. Graduating from Concord Academy, Concord, Massachusetts, in 1964, she earned her A.B. 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. Based on her research and teaching, she rose to Walter Annenberg Professor of History. A specialist in the history of the South in the antebellum period and Civil War, Faust developed new perspectives in intellectual history of the antebellum South and in the changing roles of women during the Civil War. She is the author of six books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, for which she won both the Society of American Historians Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians in 1997. Fausts most recent book, This Republic of Suffering , was a critically acclaimed examination of how Americas understanding of death was shaped by the Civil War and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. | 
