Joel Michael Reynolds

Joel Michael Reynolds (born 1985) is an American philosopher whose research focuses on disability.[1] His areas of specialization include Philosophy of Disability, Bioethics, Continental Philosophy, and Social Epistemology.[2] He is an assistant professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies in the Department of Philosophy at Georgetown University,[3][4] a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics,[5] a senior bioethics advisor to The Hastings Center,[6] and core faculty in Georgetown's Disability Studies Program.[7] In 2022, he was named a Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation (class of 2025) in support of his project “Addressing the Roots of Disability Health Disparities."[8][9] He is the founder of the Journal of Philosophy of Disability,[10][11][12][13][14] which he edits with Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, & Society, a book series from Oxford University Press which he edits with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson.[15]

Reynolds is the author of a number of books, including The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (University of Minnesota Press, May 2022),[16] The Meaning of Disability (Oxford University Press, under contract), and Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (Polity, under contract). He is also the co-editor of The Disability Bioethics Reader (Routledge, May 2022) with Christine Wieseler, The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability (Oxford University Press, under contract) with Erik Parens, Liz Bowen, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and of a 2020 special issue of The Hastings Center Report, “For All of Us? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge,” also with Erik Parens.[17]

He earned his B.A. in philosophy as well as religious studies from the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon[18][19] and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University.[20] He has received fellowships supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.[21] Reynolds previously taught at The University of Massachusetts Lowell;[22] he held the inaugural Rice Family Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics and the Humanities at The Hastings Center from 2017 to 2020;[23] and he held the inaugural Laney Graduate School Disability Studies Fellowship at Emory University from 2014 to 2015.[24] At the University of Oregon, Reynolds won the George Rebec Prize for best essay by a philosophy student in 2007, 2008, and 2009.[25] Also in 2009, he won the President's Award from the Robert D. Clark Honor's College for Distinguished Thesis.[26]