Eleanor Paynter is Assistant Professor of Italian, Migration, and Global Media Studies. She holds a 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 at Brown University. Paynter's interdisciplinary work bridges critical refugee studies and transnational Italian studies and has been recognized with ACLS and NEH grants. She draws on the methods of ethnography, oral history, and media and narrative 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 in Italy. Her published work has covered topics including migrant reception and crisis racism, the politics of rescue, refugee filmmaking and life writing, deterrence media, and comparative work across Mediterranean and North American border zones. She also has also discussed these issues in public-facing outlets and via the podcast Migrations: A World on the Move. Her book Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (forthcoming, University of California Press), engages a range of testimonies by people who reached Italy via the Mediterranean Sea 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. In current research, Paynter is at work on a project called Up/Rooted about farmworkers, migration, refugeeness, and connections to land.