Early Life and Career
Faust was born Catherine Drew Gilpin in New York City and raised in Clarke County, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. She is the daughter of Catharine Ginna (née Mellick) and McGhee Tyson Gilpin, a Princeton graduate and breeder of thoroughbred horses. Her paternal great-grandfather, Lawrence Tyson, was a U.S. Senator from Tennessee during the 1920s. Faust is a descendant of the Puritan divine Rev. Jonathan Edwards, the third president of Princeton.
Graduating from Concord Academy, Concord, Massachusetts, in 1964, she earned her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College in 1968. She graduated magna cum laude with honors in history. She received her A.M.in 1971 and her Ph.D. in American Civilization with thesis titled A sacred circle: the social role of the intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 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. Faust’s most recent book, This Republic of Suffering (2008), was a critically acclaimed examination of how America’s understanding of death was shaped by the Civil War and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award (see awards below).
In 2001, Faust was appointed the first dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the successor to Radcliffe College.
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