Eleni Schirmer is a writer. Her work – which has appeared in The New Yorker,The New York Times, The Nation, In These Times and elsewhere – has profiled fast-food workers in Florida, public school teachers in Wisconsin, and trailer park residents in Vermont. She is currently working on a book about the rise of aging debtors. 

Eleni is the inaugural Rosa Luxemburg Journalism fellow. She was a 2025-26 Spencer fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Prior to full-time freelancing, Eleni received a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She held a postdoc at Concordia University’s Social Justice Centre, and was a research associate with UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Her dissertation – selections of which won the Frank Zeidler Labor History award and other recognitions – was a political biography of Wisconsin’s largest public sector union, the Milwaukee teachers’ union.

She has taught graduate and undergraduate classes at UW–Madison, Middlebury College, and McGill University. She organizes with The Debt Collective, an experimental union of debtors.