Jennifer J. Everett

Jennifer J. Everett is assistant professor of philosophy at DePauw, specializing in ethical theory, environmental philosophy and animal ethics.  Her career extends beyond traditional academic boundaries, however, and includes reflection on the public responsibilities of university faculty members.  Her current work centers on the ethics of sustainability in American higher education. 

Now in her second year at DePauw, Everett serves on the advisory board for the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics. She recently was appointed the University’s first sustainability programs coordinator, overseeing initiatives to help reduce its ecological footprint.

To encourage increased academic focus on contemporary global crises, Everett helped establish the Discipline Associations Network for Sustainability (DANS), which supports faculty members across the curriculum seeking to integrate sustainability issues into their courses and/or research through collaboration with members of their own disciplines.  A member of the leadership circle for the Upper Midwest Association for Campus Sustainability (UMACS), she is active on the advisory council to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). 

Before joining DePauw, Everett spearheaded transformative sustainability initiatives at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, where she taught from 2001-04 and Carleton College, where she taught from 2004-06.  In 2006 her students’ campus-based service learning projects received national media attention. 

Everett’s research has been published in Journal of Social Philosophy, Ethics and the Environment and the anthology Food for Thought: The Debate Over Eating Meat.  She is the keynote speaker for the 2007 meeting of the Minnesota Philosophical Society.  In addition to completing an invited paper for the journal Theory in Research and Education, she is co-author of an interdisciplinary environmental science text featuring ethical analysis of and practical responses to global environmental problems. 

Everett was a first-generation college student who grew up in a small town in southwest Washington.  After a few years majoring in engineering, she completed her B.S. degree in philosophy at Portland State University.  She attended graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on the ethics of household consumption in a consumer society.