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About the Director

The Rev. Dr. Jo Bailey Wells came to Duke Divinity School in 2005 from Cambridge, UK. She was previously a professor in Old Testament and Biblical Theology at Ridley Hall – a theological college (seminary) of the Church of England. Before that she was the dean of Clare College, a constituent college of Cambridge University. Ordained in the first wave of female priests in England, she has sought to balance the pastoral and teaching aspects in ministry, with a vocation to both church and academy. Beyond the Church of England, she has experience working for churches of the Anglican Communion in Uganda, Haiti and Sudan as well as in the diocese of Minnesota in the United States.

Wells has degrees from Cambridge and Durham Universities (UK), and the University of Minnesota (USA). She gained her Ph.D. from Durham University (1996) in Old Testament and Biblical Theology, under the supervision of Prof. Walter Moberly.

She has since published two books, God’s Holy People: A Theme in Biblical Theology (Sheffield: 2000) and Isaiah: The People’s Bible Commentary (BRF: 2006) as well as a number of articles and more popular devotional material.

Aside from Directing the AEHS and teaching in the areas of ministry and Bible at Duke Divinity School, Jo occasionally travels to other corners of the Anglican world, speaking at clergy conferences or retreat gatherings: recently, in Renk, Sudan and Melbourne, Australia. She has long delighted in making the fruits of biblical scholarship accessible to the church; more recently she has become keen to bring distant and different parts of the Anglican world into conversation and friendship.