Vanessa Wills is a political philosopher, ethicist, educator, and activist based in Washington, DC. Her monograph, Marx’s Ethical Vision, will be released in April 2024 and is available for pre-order from Oxford University Press.

She is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University. In Spring 2022, she 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. Dr. Wills is a founding editor of Spectre Journal, a biannual journal of Marxist theory, strategy, and analysis.

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 the ways in which economic and social arrangements can inhibit or promote the realization of values such as freedom, equality, and human development.

She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011, 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 received her Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Princeton University in 2002.

Photographs of Walter Womacka’s “Mensch und Natur”, “Mensch und Wissenschaft”, and “Mensch und Kosmos” courtesy of SpreeTom.