George Kabango Fellows 2023
Emerald Henderson
University of Birmingham
Emerald is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham. Prior to embarking on her academic career, she taught for nine years – as Head of Religion & Philosophy and Head of Eudaimonia – an experience which ignited her enduring interest in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and impressed upon her the importance of character education for a flourishing life and society. Her research interests lie at the intersection between moral philosophy, moral psychology, education and professional ethics, and predominantly concern moral exemplarism and phronesis (practical wisdom) in neo-Aristotelian character education. Correspondingly, her PhD – supervised by Professsor Kristján Kristjánsson and Dr Laura D’Olimpio – focuses on the emulation of moral role models as a method of virtuous character development. She seeks to disambiguate the methodology of emulation qua role modelling by devising a philosophically discerning and psychologically realistic 'theory of emulation'. Through doing so, she hopes to illuminate how role modelling works in different developmental phases and, naturally, the professional context of teaching.
Emerald holds a BA in Philosophy and PGCE from King’s College London, and an MA in Applied Ethics from Utrecht University. Her PhD is funded by the University of Birmingham’s College of Social Sciences Scholarship.
Shiying Li
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Shiying is a a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received a B.S. in psychology from UW-Madison and an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. Nowadays, Shiying’s research focuses on social and political philosophy, ethics, and the philosophy of education. Topics she has written on include social stigmas, distributive justice, the ethics of personal relationships and violent revolutions, social norms and self-respect.
Shiying has been developing interests and expertise in the philosophical, empirical, and practical dimensions of education and hopes to produce evidence-based scholarship in the philosophy of education that could be helpful to the practice of education in the real world. Alongside her scholarship, she enjoys teaching students from a wide range of backgrounds.
