Eleanor Paynter is Assistant Professor of Italian, Migration, and Global Media Studies. She holds a PhD from Ohio State University, and before joining the University of Oregon, held postdoctoral positions in Migrations at Cornell University and in Italian and the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. Paynter's interdisciplinary work in critical refugee studies and transnational Italian studies has been recognized with ACLS and NEH grants. She draws on the methods of ethnography, oral history, and media and narrative/discourse analysis to consider how border crossing is entangled with histories of violence and conquest, bordering, and racial capitalism, as well as practices of solidarity.
Paynter’s research focuses especially on Africa-Europe mobilities and questions of asylum, migrant reception, and racial justice. Her book Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (2024, University of California Press), engages a range of testimonies by people who reached Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and whose experiences, narratives, and creative work reveal the colonial nature of emergency responses to migration and challenge the idea that their movements across borders or their presence in Europe constitutes a crisis.
Her published articles and other interventions have covered topics including migrant reception and crisis racism, the politics of rescue, borders and human rights, refugee filmmaking and life writing, deterrence media, and comparative work across Mediterranean and North American border zones. She has also discussed these issues in public-facing outlets and via the podcast Migrations: A World on the Move.
In current research, Paynter is at work on a project about the notions of protection and safety in border spaces and how these concepts are alternately weaponized or reimagined at sites including farms, camps, rescue ships, and detention sites.
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