16:00–17:30, Stockholm time (Zoom), on 8 December 2026

After Hernán Cortés and his allies reduced Tenochtitlán to rubble in August 1521, the destruction was narrated almost immediately in apocalyptic terms. Franciscan missionaries staged the Last Judgment on the ruins of Tlatelolco. Columbus had already read the promise of a New World through Isaiah and the prophecies of Joachim of Fiore. Diego de Landa burned Maya codices at Maní as though the fate of creation itself hung on the outcome. The Bible did not simply accompany the conquest of the Americas; it supplied the temporal and moral architecture through which conquest became legible as salvation history, with indigenous peoples cast as obstacles to, or instruments of, a divine plan reaching toward its end.

Importantly, apocalyptic thought in the Americas was never a European import overlaid onto silence. Mesoamerican cosmologies already understood history as a sequence of world-endings, each sun consumed and replaced by another. The Nahua interpreted the fall of their own world through categories that predated the friars and outlasted them, and the same biblical grammar that justified subjugation would later be turned against it in movements of indigenous and anticolonial resistance across the continent.

This webinar takes up Robert Folger’s recent work on the apocalyptic as a way of asking what a specifically Latin American history of the end of the world looks like, and what it discloses about the present. The dialectic of biblical apocalypse as instrument of empire and as language of resistance did not close with the 16th Century. It persists in how catastrophe, crisis, and political rupture continue to be narrated in Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela today. Robert Folger (Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University) will offer a short framing based on the forthcoming book, Fluchtlinie Apokalypse, followed by discussion with Mårten Björk and Joel Kuhlin (At the End of the World), and the with the audience in attendance.

PLEASE NOTE: Our protocols for webinar attendance have changed. You must register in advance to attend this webinar. Please fill out this very short form, and a link to the Zoom webinar will be emailed to you at the email address you supply about 24 hours before the webinar begins: https://forms.gle/iH9jGyJNUQQhAzmS7

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Robert Folger is a historian, cultural scientist, and Ibero-Romance scholar who has held the chair of Romance Literatures at Heidelberg University since 2013. He is one of the directors of the Käte Hamburger International Centre for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies (CAPAS), founded in 2021. His forthcoming book is Fluchtlinie Apokalypse.

Mårten Björk is a systematic theologian at the Newman Institute, the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University, and an associate fellow at Campion Hall, Oxford. For At the End of the World he works at the intersection of political theory and theology.

Joel Kuhlin is post-doctoral research fellow in Bible, Politics and Culture at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University, and affiliated scholar with At the End of the World.

Mia-Marie Hammarlin will chair the webinar. She is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Lund University.

Image credit: Unknown painter, Conquista de México por Cortés. Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conquista-de-M%C3%A9xico-por-Cort%C3%A9s-Tenochtitlan-Painting.png