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.

She is working on two book projects concurrently, both of which draw from political theory, the global intellectual history of early modernity, and Asian studies. The first project explores the relationship between late Ming neo-Confucian ideas, particularly of the Taizhou school of Yangming learning, to the articulation of otherness and equality in thinkers such as Jiao Hong and Chen Di. The second project examines how Chinese and Dutch writers grounded distinctive justifications for colonial rule on the island of Taiwan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.