Jane Shaw was born in 1963 and educated at Oxford, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley. She is the Dean of Divinity and Fellow of New College, Oxford, and teaches history and theology in the university.

Her forthcoming book MAIDENS OF THE LOST ARC will be published by Knopf in 2010. Her previous book is MIRACLES IN ENLIGHTENMENT ENGLAND (Yale, 2006) and she has published articles on modern Christian history, gender, and various aspects of Times, often comments on religious matters on radio and television, and lectures widely in Britain, the United States and Australia.