Education
Ph.D. – University of Georgia
MLA – Oklahoma City University
B.S. – Oklahoma Christian University
Tess Varner joined the faculty at Concordia College in 2016. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as affiliate faculty in many interdisciplinary programs, including Global Studies, Environmental Studies, Interfaith Studies, and Social Activism. She regularly teaches courses in American Philosophy, Environmental Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, and Philosophy of Race. She enjoys designing and teaching nontraditional courses, such as Walking and Talking: Active and Embodied Philosophical Inquiry, and has taught two study away courses multiple times, Nature and Culture: Nature Writing as Public Philosophy (where students camp for a month in national parks in the American West) and Nature and Culture of Norway: Peacebuilding and Friluftsliv (where students spend a month exploring Norway’s national parks and peacebuilding culture).
Dr. Varner’s research interests are in the intersections of feminist-pragmatism, environmental philosophy, and pedagogy. She has authored chapters for The Oxford Handbook on Jane Addams and Restoration and Philosophy: New Philosophical Engagements with the Stone Campbell Tradition, as well as several other articles in journals such as Hypatia, The Pluralist, Eidos: The Journal of Philosophy of Culture, and The Public Philosophy Journal. She was honored to have received the Jane Addams Prize (2020) and the Mellow Prize (2022) from The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, as well as the John William Miller Society Essay Prize (2023). Her current writing projects circle around wildness and the West. Recently, she has been writing about pragmatism and public lands. And, in a separate project co-authored with Erin McKenna (University of Oregon), she has been investigating the language of wildness in the context of conservation politics and policies. She currently serves as the Vice President/President-Elect for the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.