Lea Pao's research interests include German and Austrian poetry, the history of information and its theories, graphic narrative theory, and the relationship between poetic language, images, storytelling, and visualization. Her current book project ( Poetry’s Work: Towards an Archaeology of Forgotten Information Concepts ) 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 collection of poetry and drawings Tian Shu into German, as Buch des Himmels (Letter P Verlag, 2012), the co-translator of Peter Janich’s What is Information? (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), and the co-editor of Information: A Reader (Columbia University Press, 2021).

At Stanford, she teaches courses on German literature, poetry, and poetics, including a course on the German Graphic Novel (from the 15th century to today), and is a member of the Comics: More Than Words research group .