A member of the Stanford University faculty has been appointed to a full professorship in the Harvard History Department, Dean McGeorge Bundy announced yesterday. H. Stuart Hughes, an authority on Modern Italy, will join the faculty here on July 1, 1957.

The appointment of Hughes will relieve the History Department of its current staff depletion, which is due to retirement, sabbatical leaves, and the attraction of positions at other universities. Hughes' field of Italian history had been partly covered by Professor Donald C. McKay, who left Harvard for Amherst last year.

Hughes himself is a graduate of Amherst, and obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1940. He was Instructor and Administrative Assistant to the president of Brown University for a year, served as a Lieutenant Colonel attached to the Office of Strategic Services during the war, and from 1945-48 worked in the European Division of the State Department. He returned to Harvard as assistant professor in 1948, and joined the faculty of Stanford in 1952.