Drew Gilpin Faust

Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust is the President of Harvard University, the first woman to hold the position and the university's 28th president overall. She is also the Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. Before accepting the position in 2007, Faust was the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and UPenn where she received her MA and PhD with a dissertation entitled, A Sacred Circle: The Social Role of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860. Her research focused on the history of the South in the antebellum period and Civil War, and she developed new intellectual history of the South and role of women during the 1860s. Her books include Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Francis Parkman Prize), This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Bancroft Prize), Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery, and A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860. Faust was named a member of "Time 100" and Forbes "100 Most Powerful Women". As President of Harvard, Faust has improved the financial aid and funding for research for the sciences. She has broadened the University's international reach, raised the profile of the arts on campus, embraced sustainability, launched edX, the online learning partnership with MIT, and promoted collaboration across academic disciplines and administrative units as she guided the University through a period of significant financial challenges.