Harvard University named Drew Gilpin Faust its president, appointing the first woman to lead the college as it tries to mend faculty-administration relations damaged under predecessor Lawrence Summers.

“I am not the woman president of Harvard,” she said. “I am the president of Harvard.”

Bruce Mann, 56, a professor at Harvard Law School, has known Ms. Faust for 20 years, since their days in the University of Pennsylvania’s history department. Ms. Faust is well suited to oversee the “notoriously ungovernable” university, he said.

“She brings to it uncommon common sense and exceptionally good judgment and a very calm, unflappable leadership style,” Mr. Mann said. “She understands very clearly that you can get people to follow you a lot more effectively and farther if you persuade than if you drag them.”

A panel of 29 alumni yesterday ratified the Harvard ruling board’s selection of Ms. Faust, a historian who is dean of the university’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Ms. Faust, 59, will become the university’s 28th president on July 1.

“She combines a powerful, broad-ranging intellect with a demonstrated capacity for strong leadership and a talent for stimulating people to do their best work,” a senior member of the ruling board of the Harvard Corporation, James Houghton, said.

Ms. Faust’s tasks will include reconciling an undergraduate faculty divided on Mr. Summers’s tenure, replacing departing deans, and overseeing the development of a new campus across the Charles River in Boston.

“The faculty and the university as a whole need to think of collaborative ways of working together,” Ms. Faust said at a news conference yesterday. “I feel tremendous positive energy.”

Ms. Faust’s priority is filling deanships for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the medical school, the design school, and her own vacancy. “If I can have the team in place when I start on July 1, that would be very helpful,” she said.

The alumni-elected board of overseers met for about two hours yesterday, according to Paul Buttenwieser, a psychiatrist in Cambridge and a member of the panel.

Frances Fergusson, former president of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and a member of the overseers and presidential search committee, said Ms. Faust addressed the 22 overseers present for about 45 minutes at a meeting at Loeb House on the Harvard campus.

Ms. Faust left the room and the board, after deliberating briefly, voted unanimously to make her president.

“We definitely had a toast,” Mr. Buttenwieser said after the meeting. “What I can say is we chose a great new president for Harvard.”

The group chose Ms. Faust from candidates such as Nobel Prize winner Thomas Cech, who is president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md.

Ms. Faust received a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia and her master’s and doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Faust will be the first leader without a Harvard degree since Charles Chauncy, the school’s second president between 1654 and 1672.

Before joining the Radcliffe Institute in 2001, Ms. Faust was a professor of history for 25 years and director of the women’s studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written five books, including “Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.”

Ms. Faust serves as a trustee at Bryn Mawr, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York, and the National Humanities Center, an institute for advanced study in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.

Harvard is in the midst of a curriculum review that might change undergraduate academic requirements. The reassessment began under Mr. Summers four years ago. A draft proposal in October called for students to study religion, among other subjects, a provision dropped in December. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is scheduled to discuss the report on February 13.

Ms. Faust served on two task forces on the sciences that Summers created. She also sought to increase Radcliffe’s influence in the sciences at the university.

Ms. Faust is married to Charles Rosenberg, professor of the history of science at Harvard. Her stepdaughter, Leah Rosenberg, is an assistant professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Daughter Jessica Rosenberg, a former co-president of the Radcliffe Union of Students, is a fact checker for the New Yorker magazine.