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C
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RS 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.


