Squirrel Friends

C AROLINA A RE has had years of experience in PR and social media strategy, and is now a PhD student and visiting lecturer based in London. Her research focuses on when Internet trolling becomes illegal, blending criminology, social media, subculture and sociological studies. Carolina has recently spoken at the International Criminology Conference in Washington, DC, and at INSPIRE in Brussels, resulting in two published articles. Carolina has also presented her work at Swansea’s Cyber Network Conference in 2017, at the International Journalism Festival in 2015 and at ECREA 2014.

R UTGER B IRNIE is a political theorist finishing his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He specializes in the political theory of citizenship and migration, though he has also worked on various topics in applied ethics.

K ATE B ORNSTEIN is a celebrated performance artist who’s toured nationally and internationally for over thirty years. Most recently, they co-starred in Straight White Men on Broadway. Kate is the subject of the documentary movie, Kate Bornstein Is A Queer and Pleasant Danger , and appeared with Caitlyn Jenner on E! TV’s I Am Cait . Kate has also written six groundbreaking books, including Gender Outlaw , and Hello, Cruel World .

A NNELIESE C OOPER is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in Modern Painters, Artinfo, Women and Hollywood , Bustle (for whom she recapped Season Six of RuPaul’s Drag Race ), and the Popular Culture and Philosophy title, David Bowie and Philosophy: Rebel Rebel (2016). She has a BFA in Film Studies from Columbia University, where she received the Andrew Sarris Memorial Award for Film Criticism, and an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from The New School. These days, she’s working on a book about the messy intersection of literary translation, queer sexuality, and German poetry.

A NNA F ENNELL is majoring in Psychology and minoring in Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She studies expressive therapies and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and plans to go to graduate school for psychotherapy. She comes from a musical theatre arts background and has been an avid fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race since high school.

A LICE F OX earned an MSc from the University of Twente in The Netherlands, focusing on Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Society. She specialized in Technology and the Human Being, and is currently focusing on publishing papers oriented towards intersections of technology and identity. As an ally and member of the LGBTQ+ community, this specific topic has been one she’s been working on since November of 2017, and she is enthusiastic to continue telling anyone who will listen about the dynamic values the drag community has to offer in philosophy and technology.

D AWN G ILPIN ’s research explores the implications of today’s changing media environment on the construction of complex individual and collective identities. She came to academia after a strategic communication career in Italy, cutting her teeth on visual and textual television analysis in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom before earning her PhD in Mass Media and Communication from Temple University in Philadelphia. Dawn is currently an associate professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She has published in areas ranging from public relations to communication theory to visual rhetoric, just to keep life interesting.

H ENDRIK K EMPT holds an MA in philosophy from Humboldt University Berlin and has been a visiting research fellow at the University of Missouri, University of Southern California and Brown University. He currently works as a research associate at the Center for Advanced Studies (FoKoS) of the University of Siegen. He keeps busy with his doctoral thesis on moral semantics and has published on artificial intelligence, energy justice, and other topics of applied ethics. He is working on a book on the role talking robots will have in society.

L EONARDO A COSTA L ANDO graduated in psychology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)—Facultad de Psicología (Argentina). He contributed to books such as Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image, The Ages of the Justice League, The Representation of the Mother-in-Law in Literature, Film, Drama and Television , and The Ascendence of Harley Quinn: Essays on DC’s Enigmatic Villain .

L UCY M C D ONALD is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. She works at the intersections of philosophy of language, linguistics, ethics, and political philosophy, and is interested in the ways we use language to enforce moral and social norms. She has worked on slurs, hate speech, cat-calling, the pragmatics of compliments, and more recently, the ways we use language to shame and blame each other.

P ETER N AGY is a media scholar with a master’s degree in psychology from Eötvös Loránd University and a PhD in management from Corvinus University of Budapest. Before joining the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, Peter worked as a school psychologist and as a research fellow at Central European University’s Center for Data, Media and Society in Budapest. Peter’s research interests include the impact of virtual worlds and computer games on identity formation, and he has contributed to several projects revolving around Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as publishing in academic journals.

O LIVER N ORMAN is a graduate student at the Université de Poitiers in France. He obtained his MA in 2018 and is now preparing for the French teaching exam l’agrégation before starting his PhD. His research revolves mainly around the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Vladimir Jankélévitch; having written his theses on Silence in Kierkegaard’s philosophy and the problem of death and seriousness in Jankélévitch. He has published “Silence in Kierkegaard’s Concessional Discourse” in the Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter . He has presented on Drag and Philosophy at the Florida State University Minorities and Philosophy Conference (2017) and at the Engaging the Contemporary Conference in Malta (2018).

H OLLY O NCLIN is an illustrator and drag enthusiast living in Vancouver, BC, with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of British Columbia. She’s incredibly pleased to have finally found some way to justify all the time she’s spent watching RuPaul’s Drag Race instead of doing philosophy.

F ERNANDO G ABRIEL P AGNONI B ERNS works at Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)—Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina). He teaches seminars on international horror film. He is director of the research group on horror cinema “Grite” and has published articles on Argentinian and international cinema and drama in: Imagofagia, Vita e Pensiero: Comunicazioni Sociali, Anagnórisis, Lindes, and UpStage Journal, among others. He has published chapters in the books Divine Horror, To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post 9/11 Horror, The Make-Up of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Peanuts and Philosophy, The Twilight Zone and Philosophy, Time-Travel Television, James Bond and Popular Culture , and The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy , among others. He is now working on a book about the Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir .

S ANDRA R YAN is a departmental assistant and PhD student in philosophy at the University of Limerick. She is determined to complete her dissertation on sublime objects and their contemporary cultural applications but is often distracted by new seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race .

M ARTA S ZNAJDER is a postdoctoral researcher at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. She graduated in 2017 from LMU Munich and the University of Groningen, with a dissertation that combined inductive logic with the theory of conceptual spaces. Her wider interests include formal epistemology and philosophy of logic and she has been a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race since 2013.

G UILEL T REIBER has been a fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race from Season Two onward (Season One had terrible lighting). This has not prevented him from almost finishing his doctoral dissertation on issues of political resistance and activism as understood by contemporary French political philosophy, such as in the works of Foucault and Rancière. He has been a doctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Belgium since 2014.

A LICE V AN DER W IELEN is a Brussels-based artistic and intellectual centipede, who has a background in circus and transitioned from literary studies to contemporary dance and dramaturgy. Alice has a master’s in Western Literature as well as a research master’s in Literary Studies at KU Leuven, and is now pursuing an MA in dramaturgy at Utrecht University.

J ULIE V AN DER W IELEN is a Belgian PhD student in philosophy. After secondary school she went on to study circus, then she studied philosophy at the outstanding Institute of Philosophy of KU Leuven. Currently she studies and teaches the work of Gilles Deleuze at the University Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile and at Leiden University in Holland. Julie supports “like God in drag” as a dramatic principle.

M EGAN V OLPERT is the author of many books on communication and popular culture, including two Lambda Literary Award finalists. After seven years as a nationally competitive debater, she competed in poetry slams for several more. Her MFA in Creative Writing is from Louisiana State University and she writes regularly for PopMatters . She has been teaching high-school English in Atlanta for over a decade and was chosen as 2014 Teacher of the Year. She edited the American Library Association-honored anthology This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching .

M ARIANA Z ÁRATE , MA, graduated from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)—Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina). She has contributed to Racism and Gothic: Critical Essays, Bullying in Popular Culture: Essays on Film, Television and Novels, Projecting the World: Classical Hollywood, the “Foreign,” and Transnational Representations, Uncovering Stranger Things , and The Handmaid’s Tale and Philosophy: A Womb of One’s Own (2019).