Lea Pao

Lea Pao's research interests include German and Austrian poetry, the history of information and its theories, and literary theory. Her book An Archaeology of Forgotten Information Practices (Cornell UP, 2026) explores the ways in which ideas about information—and the history of twentieth-century information theory—can shape our thinking about poetry’s social, cultural, and linguistic work, and vice versa. 

She is the translator of Q. G. Li’s Tian Shu into German, as Buch des Himmels (Letter P Verlag, 2012), and the co-translator of Peter Janich’s What is Information? (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). She is the co-editor of Information: A Reader (Columbia University Press, 2021).

At Stanford, she teaches courses on German literature, poetry, and poetics.