Professor Leigh K. Jenco

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 examines folksong compendia of the late Ming and early Qing periods (16th-17th centuries) as sources of non-elite experience and evidence of their participation in cultural production. In particular, she theorizes transmission--a longstanding preoccupation of the Chinese textual tradition, in which resources from the past were compiled and preserved for future readers—as a key practice through which non-elite experience can be made present in, but also pose challenges to, written sources as enduring sites of political as well as aesthetic value.

• Chinese political thought (Ming, Qing and Republican periods)
• Comparative and postcolonial political theory
• Global intellectual history
• Taiwan studies
• Discourses of empire in East Asia

• GV4K2: Postcolonial and Comparative Political Theory
• GV346: Global Political Thought