Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust, a noted Civil War historian, will be awarded Boston College’s first Sesquicentennial Medal in recognition of her excellence as a scholar and leader in the academy on Oct. 10 at 4 p.m. in Robsham Theater. Faust is the author of six books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997. Her most recent book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, looks at the impact of the Civil War’s enormous death toll on the lives of 19th-century Americans. It won the Bancroft Prize in 2009, was a finalist for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize,  and is the basis for the PBS American Experience documentary “Death and the Civil War.”