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 has served as associate editor of the flagship journal American Political Science Review 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.

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 book project explores the relationship between late Ming neo-Confucian ideas, particularly of the Taizhou school of Wang Yangming learning, to the articulation of otherness and equality in thinkers such as Jiao Hong and Chen Di.