Drew Faust: Her path to Harvard
... Faust, an award-winning historian expected to be named Harvard's president today, reveals much about herself and her work habits in a three-decade career as a scholar of the American south. Her goal, she has said in interviews, is not simply to tell the stories of the neglected. Instead, colleagues say, Faust wants to confront the truth -- even when it is ugly.
Pulitzer-winning historian Steven Hahn , who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where Faust taught American history for 25 years, said he has joked with Faust about her propensity to investigate often unsavory characters.
"She just laughed," he said. "She's interested in people wrestling with all sorts of challenging circumstances."
Faust's work parallels her efforts to reconcile her past with her present; as a privileged white girl with black servants who rejected her Southern lifestyle, school segregation, and her dying mother's views of the "lady" she should be.
As a child in Virginia, Faust refused to learn to sew and instead joined the 4-H club to raise sheep and cattle with the boys. As an undergraduate history major in the late 1960s at Bryn Mawr College, a women's college near Philadelphia, she attended rallies for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.
But as an adult, she traded activism for history, she wrote in a 2003 article in Harvard Magazine. In 1975, she earned her doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation was about the white, male intellectuals in the slave-holding south. Then she went to work as a professor at Penn, devoting her life to digging through Southern archives, unfolding dusty files and blood-stained letters.
Though much of her research is on women and African-Americans, her work encompasses a broader range of topics about the South -- including white elitism, Confederate nationalism, and slave-ownership. Her sixth book, about how the South handled death, is due out next year....
Read entire article at Boston Globe
Pulitzer-winning historian Steven Hahn , who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where Faust taught American history for 25 years, said he has joked with Faust about her propensity to investigate often unsavory characters.
"She just laughed," he said. "She's interested in people wrestling with all sorts of challenging circumstances."
Faust's work parallels her efforts to reconcile her past with her present; as a privileged white girl with black servants who rejected her Southern lifestyle, school segregation, and her dying mother's views of the "lady" she should be.
As a child in Virginia, Faust refused to learn to sew and instead joined the 4-H club to raise sheep and cattle with the boys. As an undergraduate history major in the late 1960s at Bryn Mawr College, a women's college near Philadelphia, she attended rallies for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.
But as an adult, she traded activism for history, she wrote in a 2003 article in Harvard Magazine. In 1975, she earned her doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation was about the white, male intellectuals in the slave-holding south. Then she went to work as a professor at Penn, devoting her life to digging through Southern archives, unfolding dusty files and blood-stained letters.
Though much of her research is on women and African-Americans, her work encompasses a broader range of topics about the South -- including white elitism, Confederate nationalism, and slave-ownership. Her sixth book, about how the South handled death, is due out next year....