Her research interests lie in aesthetics, metaethics, and Chinese philosophy, with a particular focus on the normativity of aesthetic  and ethics. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include ethics, environmental ethics, philosophy of music, and epistemology.

She is the author of “Why Follow the Score? Aesthetic Normativity in Performing Classical Music and the Genuine Performing Experience” (forthcoming in British Journal of Aesthetics), and of “The Perils of Rejecting the Parity Argument” (Philosophy, 2023) . She has also published in journals such as Philosophy and American Journal of Bioethics – Neuroscience and Chinese Studies . She regularly presents at professional conferences, including annual meetings of the American Philosophical Association.

Before joining Duke Kunshan, Zhou was a postdoctoral researcher at Zhejiang University. She holds a B.A. in Political Education from China Youth University for Political Sciences, an M.A. in Philosophy from Renmin University of China, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Arizona, where she also completed a doctoral minor in piano performance and music education at the Fred Fox School of Music.