Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Welcomes Inaugural Rice Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities
Joel Michael Reynolds has joined The Hastings Center as its first Rice Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities. The fellowship is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and private donors.
The fellowship is a component of the Humanities Research Initiative (HRI), a major new research program at The Hastings Center created through a NEH challenge grant to enlarge and deepen its core commitment to humanities-based scholarship in bioethics and to continue to develop leadership in this area. The Hastings Center was one of 21 institutions awarded NEH challenge grants in 2011.
Reynolds, who received his PhD in philosophy from Emory University in 2016, focuses on foundational issues concerning ethics, society, and “embodiment” — the ways in which people’s bodies shape their experiences, understanding, and judgement. During his two-year fellowship at the Center, he will pursue the HRI’s current theme, “The Gift and Weight of Genomic Knowledge.” Among the questions he will ask is: Do individuals have, as some scholars have recently suggested, a duty to know whatever genomic information is available about them? Reynolds’s research has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience, the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Medicine, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and The Review of Communication. He was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Graduate Teaching Fellow. Read more about him here.
Erik Parens, a senior research scholar, is leading the HRI and says of Reynolds: “Joel is a highly interdisciplinary and wonderfully focused scholar, whose presence is a great boon to the Center. I can’t wait to see how he advances his own research and contributes to the HRI’s current theme.”
“I am delighted to join the research team at The Hastings Center,” says Reynolds. “It is an honor to work with such fantastic scholars and be a part of the historic mission and legacy of the Center. I am also grateful to the NEH and donors for support of this initiative, and I greatly look forward to contributing to its inaugural theme.”