The Alumni Speaker Series committee has invited Lea Pao to give a public talk about her research in December 2024. Lea is an Assistant Professor of German Studies at Stanford and a 2017 graduate of the Comparative Literature Ph.D. program at Penn State. She researches and teaches German and Austrian poetry, global poetics, and the history of information and its theories. Her talk is entitled: “Making a Poet: The Case of Hertha Kräftner.”
When: December 12, 10:30am
Where: 157 Burrowes
Abstract: Hertha Kräftner was a post-war Austrian poet who died by suicide at the age of 23. The fact that she is remembered today owes itself to two men—a well-known poet and an influential editor—who rediscovered her in the 1960s and published the writings, journals, and poems she had left behind in her apartment. This talk is about Kräftner’s emergence: how she posthumously became a poet, how her rediscovery resolved, at least in part, the question of Kräftner’s suicide and family history, and how these gendered forms of making and discovery shape our literary and poetic modes of interpretation.
