Joel Michael Reynolds (PhD, MA) is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies, Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and Faculty in the Disability Studies Program and Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University. They are jointly appointed as faculty in Georgetown University’s School of Medicine and Medical Center in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics as well as in the Department of Family Medicine. They co-chair the School of Medicine’s bimonthly Ethics M&M Conference and sit on the MedStar Washington Hospital Center Ethics Committee. They are currently a Faculty Fellow of the Georgetown-Howard Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice (MHHJ) for a project on disability and AI implementation in healthcare. Reynolds is founder and editor-in-chief of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability, co-founder and co-editor of the book series Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society, and President of the Society for Philosophy and Disability. An internationally recognized expert on disability, their work has been translated into multiple languages, and they have given over 150 keynote addresses and endowed lectures, conference talks, and grand rounds at universities and schools of medicine across the globe. In recognition of the impact and promise of their scholarship, they were named an Honorary Fellow of the McLaughlin College of Public Policy at York University in 2022, elected as a Fellow of the Hastings Center for Bioethics in 2023, selected as a Faculty Scholar (Class of 2025) of the Greenwall Foundation, and won the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor award in 2026. Dr. Reynolds’ work has appeared or been cited in outlets including TIME, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Radio France, National Post, Truthout, AEON, The Conversation, Health Progress, The Hastings Bioethics Forum, The Philosopher, and a Tedx talk.
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, 2027), and Philosophy of Disability: An Introduction (Polity, 2028). 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.
