Besides her professorial responsibilities at Penn, Faust is president of the Southern Historical Association and serves on the executive boards of the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Historians.

She is a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, from which she graduated in 1968. She did her graduate work at Penn, receiving her Ph.D. in American Civilization in 1975.

Faust's specializes in the American Civil War. She is the author of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. She is currently working on a book about the war's death toll.

A native of Virginia's Shenendoah Valley, Faust has written several books about the Confederacy and Southern women.

Faust and her husband, Charles S. Rosenberg, a specialist in the history of medicine, were offered tenured positions at Harvard in 1989, which they turned down.

Though she said yesterday that the professorial appointments "never seemed worth the upheaval" of moving, Faust said the opportunity to head Radcliffe--and effectively shape the future of the Institute--"was something completely different, and something I couldn't duplicate at Penn."

Rudenstine said yesterday that Rosenberg will also receive a tenured position at Harvard, one "with lots of flexibility" to pursue his work in the fields of history, history of science and medicine.

Faust's appointment is the fruition of nearly an eight-month search that saw 80 to 100 names for the position pass over Rudenstine's desk.