Vanessa Christina Wills

Dr. Vanessa Wills is a political philosopher, ethicist, educator, and activist based in Washington, DC, where she is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University. Her monograph, Marx’s Ethical Vision, will be released in August 2024 and is available for pre-order from Oxford University Press.

Dr. Wills is a founding editor of Spectre Journal, a biannual journal of Marxist theory, strategy, and analysis. In Spring 2022, Dr. Wills was Visiting Faculty Fellow at UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities. In 2019/20, she was DAAD Visiting Chair in Ethics and Practice at Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität’s Munich Center for Ethics. She was previously Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St. Joseph’s University.

Her areas of specialization are moral, social, and political philosophy, nineteenth century German philosophy (especially Karl Marx), and the philosophy of race. Her research is importantly informed by her study of Marx’s work, and focuses on how socioeconomic arrangements can inhibit or promote the realization of values such as freedom, equality, and human development.

Dr. Wills earned her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where she wrote her dissertation on the topic, “Marx and Morality.” She conducted part of her dissertation research at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as a Fulbright Scholar in the 2010-11 academic year. Dr. Wills earned her Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy at Princeton University.