Joel Michael Reynolds (PhD, MA) is Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies, Director of the Disability Studies Program, and Faculty in the Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University. They hold joint appointments as Faculty in the Department of Family Medicine as well as in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University School of Medicine and Medical Center, and they sit on the MedStar Washington Hospital Center Ethics Consult Subcommittee. They are also Faculty Scholar (Class of 2025) of the Greenwall Foundation and from 2025-26 will be Faculty Fellow of the Georgetown-Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice (MHHJ). Since 2021, they have been Visiting Lecturer in Bioethics at the Yale School of Medicine. Reynolds is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of the book series Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society. In recognition of the impact of their scholarship, they were named Honorary Fellow of the McLaughlin College of Public Policy at York University in 2022 and elected as Fellow of The Hastings Center in 2023.
Bridging inquiry across the humanities, social sciences, and medical practice, Reynolds’ research explores foundational and applied issues in ethics, especially in relation to disability and embodiment. Their work seeks health justice as rooted in methods that prioritize first-person data (phenomenology, ethnography, and other grounded qualitative approaches) and that center the lived experience of historically marginalized and oppressed groups.
Reynolds is the author or co-author of over seventy scholarly publications spanning philosophy, public health, and biomedical ethics as well as six books including The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), The Disability Bioethics Reader (Routledge, 2022), Disability Justice in Public Health Emergencies (Routledge, 2024), The Art of Flourishing (Oxford University Press, 2025), The Meaning of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2026), and Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (Polity, 2027). Their current research includes a number of article-length studies as well as books chapters for Philosophical Foundations of Disability Law, Methods in Medical Ethics, The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, and The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. Their public philosophy has been featured in TIME, AEON, The Conversation, Health Progress, The Bioethics Forum, and in a Tedx talk. For more information, see https://www.joelreynolds.me.
