Cameron Hu studies emerging formations of liberal imperialism and technoscientific capitalism. He received a BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation, Knowing Destroying, received the Daniel F. Nugent Prize in historical anthropology. He has published widely in social theory and art criticism. A postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he is currently writing an ethnography of a Texas oil field and a series of essays on modernist grammars of activity, necessity, historicity, and knowingness.