Joel Michael Reynolds

Joel Michael Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Bioethics Advisor to and Fellow of The Hastings Center, and Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation. At Georgetown, they are also core faculty in the Disability Studies Program, affiliated faculty in the Medical Humanities Initiative, a faculty fellow of Ethics Lab, and director of graduate placement in the Department of Philosophy. They are the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of the book series Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society from Oxford University Press.

At the broadest level, Dr. Reynolds’ work explores foundational issues at the intersection of ethics, biomedicine, and society. Bringing reflective and empirical studies together, their research spans the humanities and social sciences, with a special focus on identifying, understanding, and addressing disability health disparities. They are particularly concerned with the meaning of disability, the issue of ableism, and how philosophical inquiry into each might improve the lives of disabled people and the justness of practices in medicine, science, politics, and law. Based on their 2018 AMA Journal of Ethics article, “Three Things Clinicians Should Know About Disability,” Dr. Reynolds regularly speaks with and consults for medical educators across specialties concerning how to improve the quality and equity of care for patients with disabilities, including recent talks at the schools of medicine at Yale, Harvard, Tufts, University of Washington, and UCLA, and for grand rounds in the USA and Canada, including Brown University’s Department of Emergency Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Parkland Health & Hospital System, University of Texas Medical Branch, Hackensack Meridian Health, Oakland University School of Medicine, and Horizon Health Network. An internationally recognized expert on disability bioethics, they have given more than one hundred lectures, keynote addresses, and conference talks across the globe, including recent and upcoming international talks at the University of Southern Denmark, University of Lyon (France), University of Basel (Switzerland), Universidad de La Salle (Columbia), University of Warsaw (Poland), Middle East Technical University (Turkey), Deakin University (Australia), and Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada). Dr. Reynolds also advises and provides expert testimony for legal teams in the USA and Canada on disability discrimination and disability rights cases.

Reynolds is the author or co-author of over fifty journal articles, book chapters, and scholarly commentaries. They are also author or co-editor of five books, including The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), The Disability Bioethics Reader (Routledge, 2022), The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability, Technology, and Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2024), The Meaning of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2024), and Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (Polity, 2024). Their article-length work appears in leading journals across multiple fields, including The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, Episteme, Biological Psychiatry, Journal of Medical Ethics, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Hastings Center Report, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Hypatia, Epoché, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Chiasmi International. Current research includes a multi-year, externally funded project from The Greenwall Foundation on the relationship between concepts of disability and health metrics such as quality of life as well as book chapters for Philosophical Foundations of Disability Law, The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, Climate Change and Mental Health Equity, The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, and The Oxford Handbook of Genetic Counseling.

Their public scholarship includes pieces in TIME, AEON, The Conversation, Health Progress, The Bioethics Forum, The Philosopher, and a Tedx talk. They are the founder and chair of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy’s Committee on Accessibility, Disability, and Inclusion, and they sit on the board of the Society for Philosophy and Disability as well as on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies and the Journal of Human-Technology Relations. In 2020, they co-edited a special issue of The Hastings Center Report with Erik Parens entitled, “For All of Us? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge,” which was based on an interdisciplinary conference exploring that subject they co-organized at Brooklyn Law School two years earlier. In 2021, they completed co-directorship (also with Parens) of a multi-year, $250k NEH Public Humanities grant project, The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability, Technology, and Belonging, the book form of which will appear from Oxford University Press next year. In 2022, they directed the 46th annual meeting of The International Merleau-Ponty Circle at Georgetown University on the theme, “Fits and Misfits: Rethinking Disability, Debility, and the World with Merleau-Ponty.” A special issue based in part on this conference and co-edited with Gail Weiss is in production for Puncta: A Journal of Critical Phenomenology.

Dr. Reynolds’ research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Greenwall Foundation. They were named an Honorary Fellow of the McLaughlin College of Public Policy at York University in 2022 and elected as a Fellow of The Hastings Center in 2023. They earned a B.A. in Philosophy as well as in Religious Studies from the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Emory University. They previously held the inaugural Rice Family Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center from 2017-2020 and the inaugural Laney Disability Studies Fellowship at Emory University from 2014-15. You can reach Dr. Reynolds (they/he) by email at joel.reynolds@georgetown.edu

If you want to learn more, you can find open-access versions of a good swath of their research on PhilPapers.