Leigh Jenco (BA, Bard College; MA and PhD, University of Chicago) joined LSE in 2012, after teaching at the National University of Singapore. She has held visiting positions at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan; the Department of History, National Taiwan University; and the University of Heidelberg. She was associate editor of the flagship journal American Political Science Review (2016-2020) and principal investigator for the Humanities in the European Research Area grant project "East Asian Uses of the European Past," funded by the European Commission. She is currently Project Lead for the three-year, £1.5 million global convening project Chinese Global Orders funded by the British Academy.

Her first two monographs—Making the Political: Founding and Action in the Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao (Cambridge UP, 2010) and Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West (Oxford UP, 2015)—pioneered the engagement of normative political theory with the intellectual history of modern China. Her current research explores late Ming neo-Confucian ideas about equality, including how they are manifest in poetic and literary theory. She is beginning a new project on the 20th century rediscovery of early modern Chinese folksong compendia, as a means of exploring alternative genealogies of social science.