We are thrilled to announce that Prof. Yili Zhou has been selected as a winner of the British Society of Aesthetics 2026 New Horizons Prize for her paper, “Morality and Music: A Brief Discussion on How Moral Self-Cultivation Contributes to Music Performance.”
The British Society of Aesthetics is the main professional society for aesthetics in the UK, the publisher of the British Journal of Aesthetics, and the organizer of the annual BSA conference – one of the major international conferences in aesthetics.
Prof. Zhou’s award-winning paper examines whether and how moral self-cultivation can benefit one’s musicianship. She argues how cultivating one’s moral character contributes to one’s musicianship by drawing a parallel between Mengzi’s moral extension and the performer’s practice of emotional substitution.
An earlier version of this celebrated paper was presented in our AH Division’s Works-in-Progress workshop last fall. Special thanks go to Prof. Kyle Fruh, Prof. Hwa Yeong Wang, Prof. Nathan Hauthaler, Prof. Lincoln Rathnam, Prof. Daniel Weissglass, Prof. Ben Van Overmeire, Prof. Oren Hanner, Prof. Kolleen Guy, Prof. Jill Chen, and Prof. Maximiliano Amici for their constructive and invaluable feedback, which contributed to the paper’s development.
Congratulations to Prof. Zhou on this remarkable achievement!