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Harold Braswell, Ph.D., M.S.W., LCSW

Graduate Program Coordinator; Bicentennial Fellow; associate professor
Department of Health Care Ethics

Co-Director
Confluence Program

Courses Taught

Controversies in Death and Dying; Interdisciplinary Methods in Health Care Ethics; Disability Studies; Life: A User’s Manual; Bioethics After Auschwitz

Education

  • M.S.W., Saint Louis University, 2022
  • Ph.D. Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, 2014 Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.
  • Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
  • B.A., with honors, Spanish and Portuguese, 2003 Columbia University, New York City, N.Y.

Research Interests

  • Disability studies, end-of-life care, psychoanalysis, Holocaust and genocide studies, Deaf Studies
  • Currently researching impact of Oralism on the US deaf community

Professional Experience

Grant

  • Cornerstone Learning for Living” Implementation Grant ($250,000), Teagle Foundation, 2023-5

Publications and Media Placements

Select Publications and Media Placements

  • Braswell, Harold. “Denying Nothingness: The Delusion of the Nursing Home.” Parapraxis, Issue 1, December 2022. 
  • Braswell, Harold. “Take Pity: What Disability Rights Can Learn from Religious Charity.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, special issue on disability and theology 47.5 (October 2022): 636-652.
  • Braswell, Harold. “Canada is Plunging Toward a Human Rights Disaster for Disabled People.” Washington Post, February 19, 2021. 
  • Braswell, Harold. The Crisis of US Hospice Care. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019
  • Braswell, Harold. “Putting the Right to Die in its Place: Disability Rights and Physician-Assisted Suicide in the Context of US End-of-Life Care.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, special issue “Accommodation, Recognition, Justice: Legal Treatment of Persons with Disabilities,” 72 (2018): 75-99.
  • Braswell, Harold. “My Two Moms: Disability, Queer Kinship, and the Maternal Subject.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, special issue “New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies,” 30.1 (winter 2015): 234-250.
  •  Braswell, Harold. “Can there be a Disability Studies Theory of ‘End-of-Life Autonomy?’” Disability Studies Quarterly, 31.4 (2011).
  • Braswell, Harold. “In Search of a Wide-Angle Lens.” Hastings Center Report, 41.3 (May-June 2011): 19-21.

Honors and Awards

  • Semi-Finalist, Lee Jaffe Candidates Council Paper Prize, American Psychoanalytic Association, 2025
  • K. Lynne Moritz, MD, Leadership Award, Saint Louis Psychoanalytic Institute, 2025
  • Maurice Burke Paper Prize, Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, 2024
  • Edith Sabshin Teaching Award, American Psychoanalytic Association, 2024
  • Ignite Instructor of the Year, 2023
  • Donald G. Brennan Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching (College of Arts and Science), 2023
  • Beaumont Scholarship Research Award (for project “Mapping the Relationship between Hospice and Anti-Black Housing Discrimination in Saint Louis, Missouri”), 2022
  • Faculty Excellence Award for Excellence in Diversity and Social Justice (Student Government Association), 2021
  • SLU Scholarly Works Award (for the book The Crisis of US Hospice Care)
  • Emerald Literati Award for Excellence (for the article “Putting the ‘Right to Die’ in its Place: Disability Rights and Physician-Assisted Suicide in the Context of US End-of-Life Care”) 2019
  • Bicentennial Fellowship, Saint Louis University, 2017
  • Graduate Student Essay Prize, University of Chicago Program in Medicine and Religion, 2013
  • Irving K. Zola Prize for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies, Society for Disability Studies, 2011
  • Hastings Center Report Young Scholar Essay Contest, Hastings Center, 2010