Nikhita Mendis is a dual PhD student in Anthropology and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago. She holds a BA in Middle East Studies from Brown University and an MPhil in Social Anthropology, as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar, from the University of Cambridge. During her BA and MPhil, she conducted fieldwork with Sri Lankan migrant domestic workers in Beirut and explored questions of psychogeography, labor, and Islamic legal theory. Following her MPhil, she spent a year in Amman, Jordan studying the sciences of classical Arabic rhetoric, Islamic legal jurisprudence and theology. Currently, she is interested in questions of exile/return, land, property, desertification, racial capitalism and law, which she approaches not just as objects of anthropological critique but also as problems for political theology and philosophical ethics. Her work is based in southern Spain.