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 and labor. 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 money, value, sovereignty and sectarianism as she explores the co-constitution of Lebanon’s financial infrastructure and imperial machineries of destruction. Theoretically, she is engaged with grammars of historicity, action, necessity, generality and what can be characterized as a metaphysics of exchange. Her fieldwork is based in Beirut.