Rabbi Julia Watts Belser (she/her) is Professor of Jewish Studies and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. As scholar, activist, and spiritual teacher, her work brings Jewish text and tradition into dialogue with disability studies, queer feminist ethics, and environmental justice to challenge structural violence, deepen our capacity for social justice, and honor the sacredness of all life. At Georgetown, she directs the Disability and Climate Change Public Archive Project, an initiative that documents the wisdom and insights of disabled activists, artists, and first responders on the frontlines of climate crisis.

She has held faculty fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two scholarly books, Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Power, Ethics, and Ecology: Rabbinic Responses to Drought and Disaster (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Her most recent book Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole, which won a National Jewish Book Award and the Grawmeyer Award in Religion. Her essays have appeared in a wide range of venues, including Truthout, Brevity, and TIME Magazine. She’s an avid wheelchair hiker, a vocalist, and a lover of wild places whose spiritual practice is grounded in close kinship with crows and other birds who make their homes alongside hers.