Joel Michael Reynolds is a senior advisor to The Hastings Center and an assistant professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University.  He is also the founder of the Journal of Philosophy of Disability, which he edits with Teresa Blankmeyer Burke. His research and public engagement center on foundational issues concerning ethics, society, and embodiment. What does flourishing mean in the genomic age? How do our bodies shape experience, understanding, and judgment? How can bioethics better incorporate the insights from disability studies and activism? He is especially concerned with the meaning of disability, the issue of ableism, and how philosophical inquiry into each might improve the lives of people with disabilities and the justness of institutions ranging from medicine to politics. Seeking to bring reflective and empirical insights together, he engages work across the humanities and social sciences, with a special emphasis on the role of lived experience. Dr. Reynolds is the co-director, with Erik Parens, of a 2-year, $250k NEH Public Humanities Community Conversations grant project: “The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology.”

Dr. Reynolds is the author or co-author of nearly 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, author of The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and the History of Morality (forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press), The Meaning of Disability (under contract with Oxford University Press), Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (under contract with Polity), co-editor with Christine Wieseler of The Disability Bioethics Reader (forthcoming with Routledge), and lead editor with Erik Parens of a 2020 special issue of The Hastings Center Report: “For All of Us? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge.” Current work includes a number of journal articles as well as chapters for The Oxford Handbook of Genetic Counseling, Applying Nonideal Theory to Bioethics, The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, and Critical Humanities and Aging. His public philosophy has been featured in TIME, The New York Times (forthcoming), HuffPost, AEON, and in a Tedx talk. He is also a regular contributor to the researcher-led news outlet The Conversation. From 2017-2020, Dr. Reynolds was the inaugural Rice Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center. For more detailed information, please see his website: joelreynolds.me