Drew Gilpin Faust, 59, who runs a research institute at the university, was elected by the seven-member Harvard Corporation, the school's governing body, and was also approved by the 30-member Board of Overseers.

    "This is a great day, and a historic day, for Harvard," James R. Houghton, chairman of the presidential search committee, said in a statement.

    "Drew Faust is an inspiring and accomplished leader, a superb scholar, a dedicated teacher, and a wonderful human being," the chairman said.

    Interim President Derek Bok will serve until July 1 when Faust takes over.

    Faust's ascension came a year after Lawrence H. Summers, a former Treasury secretary, resigned from the post amid fierce faculty discontent. The opposition erupted in part over Dr. Summers' suggestion that intrinsic aptitude could help explain why fewer women than men reach the highest ranks of science and math in universities.

    "I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago," Faust said at a news conference on Sunday.

    "I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard," she emphasized.

    Faust has been dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, by far the smallest of Harvard's schools, since 2001. Before that, she taught American history for more than two decades at the University of Pennsylvania.

    An expert in Southern history and a native of Virginia, she has written books on Southern women during the Civil War, on intellectuals and ideology in the Confederate south, as well as a biography of a South Carolina plantation owner, James Henry Hammond.

    Despite her lack of experience to run a large organization, Faust was apparently perceived as an adroit administrator with considerable people skills, a valued commodity after the polarization that occurred under Summers, particularly among womenon the faculty.

    Faust's colleagues describe her as a consensus-builder, in contrast to Summers, who made many enemies on the faculty with his brash and abrasive style, and his drive to overhaul a culture on the campus that his supporters thought had become complacent.

    With Faust's appointment, half of the eight U.S. "Ivy League" schools have woman presidents.