TSE Visiting Professor; Professor of of Political Theory, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Email
l.k.jenco@lse.ac.uk
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https://www.lse.ac.uk/people/leigh-jenco
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Profile
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.
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Teaching
Global Political Thought
TSE 609000 | 1 credits | Co-teach with Prof. Chien-Kang Chen
Course Description
We know that politics happens in all times and places. So does political theory—which we might understand as both scholarly and everyday reflection on political concepts, norms and goals. But typically the study of political theory in the academy has not been as global as its practice suggests. This course asks how we might think about politics if we take seriously a much wider, global range of thought about politics and try to bring all of these ideas across time and space into conversation on big questions: why do we need politics? How does a political community come into being in the first place? Who might act effectively for positive change in our communities, in our countries, and on the planet itself? Along the way, we will read classics such as the Dao De Jing as well as less well-known texts about politics such as Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. We begin and end the course with some thinking about methodology: how do we bring different voices into conversation in a way that makes sense of their contribution? Is this necessary to do, or is it mere cultural “appropriation”?