Eleanor Paynter

Eleanor Paynter works in critical refugee studies, focusing on Africa-Europe mobilities and precarious migration to and through Italy, and work that puts the Mediterranean region in conversation with others. At present, she is an ACLS Fellow and a Migrations Fellow with Cornell University's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. In this role, she collaborates with faculty on Cornell's university-wide Migrations initiative. Her work comprises programming and curriculum development as well as public-facing projects such as a podcast. She recently received the Cornell Postdoc Excellence Award in Mentoring. Eleanor's work on refugee narratives and postcolonial migration has appeared in several academic journals and public outlets and has led to new collaborative projects. Her book-in-process, Emergency in Transit, analyzes a range of migrant testimonies (oral history interviews, writing, film, and visual art) produced in Italy during Europe's recent "refugee crisis" to trace how emergency responses to migration shape the lives of people on the move, and how those crossing borders navigate extreme social and legal precarity when the systems established to welcome and provide them aid in fact racialize and exclude them. This book is based on her dissertation, which was awarded the Lynne Reiner Publishers Award for Best Dissertation by the Human Rights section of the International Studies Association. A list of published work is available at http://eleanorbpaynter.net/research/. The interdisciplinary training she received while in the Comparative Studies Ph.D. program expanded her sense of what is possible in research and in the classroom and gave her the tools to shape this work through a clear set of ethics oriented toward social justice. Courses, collaborations, and discussions from OSU continue to shape not only her research, but her work in facilitating dialogue across fields, designing courses, and writing for different audiences.