CAMBRIDGE, Mass.- Harvard University named historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its first female president on Sunday, ending a lengthy and secretive search to find a successor to Lawrence Summers and his tumultuous five-year tenure.

The seven-member Harvard Corporation elected Faust, a noted scholar of the American South and dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as the university’s 28th president. The board of overseers recommended her for the post. She was chosen after a search in which a number of potential candidates said they were not interested in the job.

“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.”

With the naming of Faust, half of the eight Ivy League schools will have a woman as president. Her selection is noteworthy given the uproar over Summers’ comments that genetic differences between the sexes might help explain the dearth of women in top science jobs, comments which sparked debates about equality at Harvard.

Faust oversaw the creation of two faculty task forces, formed in the aftermath of Summers’ remarks, to examine Harvard’s gender diversity. She has been dean of Radcliffe since 2001, two years after the former women’s college was merged into the university as a center for gender issues research.

“Our shared enterprise is to make Harvard’s future even more remarkable than its past,” Faust said. “That will mean recognizing and building on what we already do well. It will also mean recognizing what we don’t do as well as we should, and not being content until we find ways to do better.”