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 editor of five books: The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (forthcoming in 2022 with University of Minnesota Press), The Meaning of Disability (under contract with Oxford University Press), Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (under contract with Polity), The Disability Bioethics Reader (forthcoming in 2022 with Routledge and co-edited with Christine Wieseler), and The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability and Technology (forthcoming in 2023 with Oxford University Press and co-edited with Liz Bowen, Erik Parens, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson). Also with Erik Parens, he co-edited a 2020 special issue of The Hastings Center Report entitled, “For All of Us? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge.” Dr. Reynolds is the author or co-author of over thirty journal articles and book chapters, and his current research includes a number of article-length studies as well as chapters for The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, Claiming the Canon: Philosophy’s Disability History, and The Oxford Handbook of Genetic Counseling. His public philosophy has been featured in TIME, The New York Times (forthcoming), HuffPost, AEON, Health Progress, and in a Tedx talk, and he is a regular contributor to the researcher-led news outlet The Conversation. He earned his B.A. in Philosophy as well as in Religious Studies from the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Emory University. 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: https://joelreynolds.me