Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Eleanor Paynter is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her research engages narrative and ethnographic methods to explore how the entanglements of migration and racial capitalism shape forms of witnessing, experiences of border crossing, and understandings of belonging and rights. This work bridges critical refugee and postcolonial studies, focusing on the politics and literatures of migration in Italy and the Black Mediterranean. Paynter’s book-in-process, “Emergency in Transit,” challenges pervasive "crisis" framings of precarious migration through a discussion of oral, written, and filmic testimonies by African migrants en route to Europe and residing in Italy. She is committed to collaboration and the public humanities, including through podcasts, translations, and writing for broad publics and as a member of the Action Research and Rights Collective. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative studies (Ohio State University) and an MFA in poetry (Sarah Lawrence College). Before joining Brown, she was Postdoctoral Associate in Migrations at Cornell University. Her current project, “Up/Rooted,” situates contemporary issues of migrant, racial, and climate justice within a longer cultural history of the figure of the farmworker in modern Italy.