Starting Fall 2025, College of Arts & Sciences Students Can Major in Disability Studies

This fall, students in the College of Arts & Sciences will be able to declare disability studies as a major and join one of the first programs of its kind in the country.

The launch comes after years of advocacy from students, faculty, staff and community members, and Georgetown will be one of the few top-ranked universities in the country to offer an undergraduate major program dedicated to disability studies. 

Having a disability studies major – on top of the existing minor and M.A./Ph.D. certificate programs – fits into Georgetown’s mission and the Jesuit concept of cura personalis, says Joel Michael Reynolds, the director of the disability studies program and an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy. 

“It fits into our commitment to understand what it means to be human along the many dimensions of life that present themselves,” Reynolds says. “Disability will always be a central feature of human life, and its study is something that benefits everyone.”

Inherently Interdisciplinary

Most people will experience disability at some point in their lives, says Libbie Rifkin, a teaching professor in the Department of English and the founding director of the disability studies program. 

Disabled people are the largest minority group in the United States, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1 in 4 adults in the country have some type of disability. Nearly 14% of degree-seeking undergraduate Georgetown students identified as someone with a disability (mental, physical or other) in the university’s first Campus Cultural Climate Survey in 2020. 

Disability studies is an inherently broad and interdisciplinary field.

“It’s extraordinarily relevant for students entering into a range of professions,” Rifkin says.

The disability studies program at Georgetown is designed to be flexible and fit with students who are doing another major. It allows students to choose their own path, Reynolds says. The program currently has core and affiliate faculty members and courses in a wide variety of departments, including biology, psychology, philosophy, music, theology, anthropology, medicine, sociology and English. 

“Having knowledge about disability immediately puts you in a better position than the person next to you who doesn’t have that knowledge,” Reynolds says. “This is one of those sorts of fields of study where it gives you an immediate edge.”

All of the students will complete either a theoretical or practical senior capstone project, says Quill Kukla, a professor in the Department of Philosophy who served as director of the disability studies program from 2022 to 2024. The former will be a traditional, standard thesis that involves a research project, and the latter is a community based learning project, like an internship. 

“That gives people a ton of flexibility as to what they do with that final project, and it can also – depending on what their career plans are – be a really good stepping stone,” Kukla says.

And while there are no formalized tracks within the major, there are informal pathways, including for students interested in law and policy, pre-medicine and arts and humanities. 

“Students who major in this come out with such a deep appreciation of the complexity of embodiment and of social and political norms and practices,” Reynolds says. “That is very useful to be a human, to live a life out into the world and hopefully, in the end, try and make the world a better place.”

‘Students Were Hungry for This’

Starting in 2017, Georgetown students have been able to minor in disability studies, but students have expressed interest in studying the field long before that.

“I started teaching courses in disability studies as freshman writing seminars, probably as far back as 2008 and really got the sense that Georgetown students were hungry for this,” Rifkin says.

Rifkin, who served as the program director from 2017 until 2020, began to find other faculty members who wanted to teach courses in disability studies, pulling together colleagues in theater and performance studies, anthropology and health sciences. In 2014, they assembled a cluster of classes tied together by a series of events and speakers. 

“We started to develop an audience and community for this work,” Rifkin says. 

That led to finding other faculty members who were interested in or already teaching disability material in their courses, and from there, a cohort formed that worked on launching a disability studies minor. The proposal for that went through in April of 2017 and the minor program started in the fall of that year, according to Rifkin. The M.A./Ph.D. certificate was approved in 2020.

Dominic DeRamo (C’23) graduated from Georgetown in 2023 with a double major in government and philosophy and a minor in disability studies. For the past year, he has been working as a development associate at Disability Rights Fund (DRF). The organization provides funding, peer and collective learning and advocacy support to organizations of persons with disabilities in the Global South. 

“I am constantly applying lessons from my disability studies minor,” DeRamo says. “My minor helps me contextualize DRF’s efforts in global disability movements and apply critical frameworks, especially as they relate to intersectionality.”

DeRamo says he would have “absolutely” declared a major in disability studies if it were offered while he was a student. 

“The disability studies program was so important to understanding my own disability identity,” he says. 

Making It a Major

Georgetown students have been a driving force in making the new major a reality. As soon as there was a minor, there was talk about starting a major. 

“The students really initiated that conversation,” says Jennifer Natalya Fink, a professor of English and core faculty in disability studies. “They were so excited by the work they were doing in the minor and saw direct connections to their career paths.” 

Fink also served as the director of the program after Rifkin. When she was director during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fink and other faculty members started thinking about what a disability studies major at Georgetown would look like. 

A formal proposal was drafted under the guidance of Kukla. The final version of the proposal was revised and submitted by Reynolds in 2024 after they became director, and it was approved in early 2025. 

Having a major program allows students to engage more deeply with disability studies than with a minor. It will also help with research possibilities.

“It allows for both more depth and breadth,” Fink says. “You can take more diverse classes, just because they’re more of them, and then research a specific area more deeply.”

Lauren Santoro (C’26) did not know that Georgetown had a disability studies program until she took the Disability, Culture, and the Question of Care First-Year Seminar with Rifkin. But once she did, Santoro knew that she would declare disability studies as a minor as soon as she could, adding it to her other minor in English and major in psychology.

Now, Santoro plans to convert her disability studies minor to a double major with psychology. Santoro says that learning about disabilities in an academic setting has helped her take pride in her identity as a disabled person.

“Going through high school and having chronic illness and disability was really difficult,” Santoro says. “So going into a class where it was kind of like, hey, being disabled isn’t a bad thing … it just felt like I found more of a purpose, and that suddenly my experiences weren’t this tragic story.”