98 C O N T R IB U T O R S NATASHA BEAUDIN PEARSON McGill University Natasha Beaudin Pearson is a soon-to-be graduate of McGill University, where she completed a joint honours B.A. in philosophy and art history. While her philosophical interests are wide-ranging, she has a particular fondness for the continental tradition, especially phenomenology, existentialism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic theory. For her philosophy thesis, Natasha examined Freud’s seminal paper “Mourning and Melancholia” through the lens of existential anxiety, as it is conceived by Heidegger in Being and Time. The aim of her essay was to problematize the reasons Freud gives for positing a clear ontological distinction between “normal” mourning and “pathological” melancholia (the old term for clinical depression). In doing so, she sought to interrogate the bases on which our conceptions of mental health (and mental illness) are founded. A proud Montrealer, she is currently having the time of her life travelling across Argentina and Chile. PETER GAVARIS Boston College Peter Gavaris is a senior at Boston College finishing up a B.A. in English with a minor in film studies. Over the course of his studies, his primary focus has been on modernist thought and expression across visual and literary arts, and accompanying critical theory from the likes of Benjamin, Agamben, and Derrida. He has, likewise, developed an interest in cinema, with a particular infatuation with the films of Abbas Kiarostami. Peter contributes regularly as the film critic for The Heights, the independent student newspaper of Boston College, and he supplements his journalistic endeavors with significant coursework on non-fiction writing and literature. This past summer, he worked with filmmaker Rachel Boynton on the production of a documentary on how the Civil War and Reconstruction are taught in American schools. He continues to remain interested in the role of aesthetic representation in both narrative and nonfiction works. BRENDAN CHAMBERS Boston College Brendan Chambers is currently a senior at Boston College studying English and Secondary Education. His focus is in twentieth century American literature, and he is particularly interested in its intersection with philosophy and linguistics. He has recently completed a thesis that investigates how Jack Kerouac’s development and implementation of the spontaneous prose method laid the ideological foundation for the New Journalism as a movement. Brendan will be attending the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in pursuit of his PhD in English in the fall, looking to continue and deepen his studies at the nexus of the language and philosophy. 99Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019 RYAN CARDOZA Stony Brook University Ryan Cardoza is a junior studying philosophy at Stony Brook University. His philosophical areas of interest include the appearance/reality distinction (its condition of possibility and conceptual consequences), speculative metaphysics and the possibility thereof, and the problem of nihilism and its relation to knowledge. Philosophers whom he finds particularly interesting and relevant to these problems include Nietzsche, Deleuze, Kant, and Plato. He is also interested in contemporary developments in realism and rationalism in Continental philosophy, especially those influenced by Deleuze. Science is an interest as well, especially, but not limited to, the areas of Chaos Theory and Complex Systems. He is also a musician. MAXWELL WADE Rutgers University Max Wade is an undergraduate senior at Rutgers University graduating in May 2019 with a BA in philosophy and political science. His research interests include Marxism and communization theory, history of philosophy, and philosophy of religion with a specific focus on Jewish and Christian mysticism. His thesis was on the historical reception and interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return from Heidegger to the present. After graduation he plans to pursue a PhD in philosophy at Boston College. GABRIEL VIDAL Pontifical Catholic University of Chile Gabriel Vidal Quinones is a student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He began his academic career with an interest in living beings, i.e., biology. However, his interests have shifted from the empirical to the conceptual. Yet, he stays within a realm of interconnected themes—his interests include the metaphysics of individuation, mereology, ontology, and the epistemology of bioethics (especially relating to environmental issues and technology), and phenomenology. He is at work on a dissertation on the thought of Arne Naess, the father of Deep Ecology and Spinoza. Specifically, he is investigating how the metaphysics and epistemology of the latter influenced the former—a work that encompasses well Gabriel’s wide-ranging interests.