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Wyatt Wells, a native of Nashville, Tennessee, graduated from Vanderbilt University with a BA in 1986. Six years later, in 1992, he earned a Ph.D. in American History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After a year as an instructor at Chapel Hill, he took a position as an assistant editor at the Andrew Jackson Papers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He worked there three years, leaving in 1996 to be the Newcomen fellow in Business History at the Harvard Business School. The next year, he moved to Montgomery to teach at AUM. Wells has been here ever since, although in the 2001-2002 academic year he did serve as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Hong Kong.

Wells’s research has focused on the intersection of government and economics and how the issues involved often spill across national borders. He has published five books and numerous articles on subjects such as the policies of the Federal Reserve during the economically turbulent 1970s, the effort of the United States to impose its ideas about antitrust on the rest of the world during and immediately after World War II, the financial crisis that reshaped Wall Street in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Eisenhower administration’s policies towards public (electric) power, and the bitter debate in the United States in the 1890s over whether to base the currency on gold or silver. He has also produced broader studies on the history and character of capitalism and the performance of the U.S. economy in the decades after World War II. Wells has drawn on this expertise to create upper-level history classes at AUM such as “The World since 1945” and “The History of Money.”

Wyatt Wells is married and has three sons and a dog. In his spare time, he writes fiction.