Jo was part of the second intake of undergraduate women at Corpus when she arrived in 1984 to read Natural Sciences. She admits to lacking passion for her subject, but welcomed the extra-curricular activities, playing a lot of hockey and forming the women’s hockey club, together with Peterhouse and Pembroke to get enough players to form a team. Jo went on to play for the University in both Hockey and Ice Hockey.

“I have some distinct memories of the freshers’ welcome to Corpus in our first week. We were inducted Hogwarts-style into a community that felt rich in history and tradition yet far from heavy: rather, as full of humour as honour, and dedicated to the delights of literature and life. That was thanks in particular to a phenomenal senior trio of Michael McCrum (Master), Christopher Andrew (Senior Tutor) and Huw Strachan (Admissions Tutor) – augmented by legendary characters like Michael Tanner and Oliver Rackham.”

“My undergraduate years were definitely not distinguished by academic success (‘what happened,’ enquired my tutor gently, ‘that someone awarded an entrance exhibition could land a third in their first-year exams?’). The answer lay in the multitude of other joys – sporting, spiritual, artistic, political – which called for attention within and beyond Corpus. Essays and supervisions were squeezed into the cracks.”

After graduating from Corpus, Jo was awarded a Rotarian Scholarship to study Intercultural Communication at the University of Minnesota, before returning to the UK to study Theology at Durham, where she also completed her PhD. Jo then returned to Cambridge to become the Chaplain at Clare College, becoming Dean two years later - the first female Dean in the UK. She was among the first generation of women to be ordained as a Church of England priest in 1995.

After six years at Clare, where she also worked as a Director of Studies and Associate Lecturer in Old Testament, she took up a teaching position at Ridley Hall. From there she was jointly headhunted with her husband the Rev Dr Sam Wells for posts at Duke University in North Carolina, where she went to teach Old Testament and founded an Anglican theological college within Duke Divinity School.

On returning to the UK in 2013, she became the first female Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, with whom she studied at Durham, before taking up her role as Bishop of Dorking in 2016, working under the Bishop of Guildford, Andrew Watson, another Corpus alumnus (m1979).

In 2023 Jo took on a new role as the first Bishop for Episcopal Ministry in the Anglican Communion.

“When I think back – indeed visiting Corpus recently – it’s the living-in-community that feels most precious as well as most rare. There are many contexts where one can find intellectual rigour, or musical excellence, or competitive sport, or social inclusion, but it is hard to think of any single circumstance where these come together so closely and effectively around the four sides of a few small courts.

“How and where else in this world do we get the experience of living and belonging together like that, not just as Facebook friends or Twitter followers but in real-time safe space where the whole of life can be explored and expanded, negotiated and shared, risked and supported. I relish the conversations that happened and the surprise friendships that ensued.”

“I’ve worked at building community ever since in my role as a priest and now bishop – from an outer urban estate in Norwich, to a student campus in North Carolina, to a religious community in Lambeth Palace, and now to Anglican bishops in 165 countries around the globe, following a similar model even if longing for the glorious interdisciplinary infrastructure we were so privileged to inhabit for three precious years of young adulthood!”