BEIRUT: A former American University of Beirut student has been nominated to direct the senior board of governance at one of the world’s premier academic establishments.

Leila Fawaz was elected director of Harvard University’s Board of Overseers for 2011-12 Thursday, the first Lebanese academic to be given such an honor. She beat leading Boston lawyer Robert Shapiro to the post.

“I am absolutely honored, not only to be elected as director to the board, but also to serve our distinguished alumni around the world,” Fawaz told The Daily Star. “It’s just very exciting. I have served on the board for five years, but it is still a great honor.”

Born in Sudan to Lebanese parents and raised in Lebanon, Fawaz is the Issam M. Fares Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies and founding director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. She took two degrees at AUB between 1967 and 1968 and pursued graduate studies at Harvard between 1972 and 1979.

Fawaz paid tribute to the academic experience she enjoyed in Beirut.

“I am grateful to AUB and for all my education in Lebanon,” she said. “I found my teachers wonderful.”

Fawaz also thanked Harvard president Drew Faust, the first female to occupy the position at the univeristy, and said her election as director of the Board of Overseers demonstrated the high value that the university placed on internationalism.

“I wonder if I am even the first non-U.S. born academic to be elected to direct the board, but it is not about that,” she said. “My election reflects the international nature of Harvard.”

Faust welcomed Fawaz’s appointment and that of Shapiro as vice-chair of Harvard’s executive committee.

“We’re greatly fortunate to have such an outstanding pair of Overseers to lead the board forward next year,” she said.

“I have served like many others on many committees, so I know I can handle a lot of work,” Fawaz said.

A Carnegie Scholar from 2008 to 2010, Fawaz has authored two volumes, “An Occasion for War” and “Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut,” and is currently working on a study of the World War I experience of Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia.