Loving Apocalypse Too Much

About this inaugural lecture

In times of trouble, why are we fascinated by Apocalypse? Are fantasies of the End of the World inherently escapist, as some have argued? Or are they expressions of a deep-seated desire to come to terms with the conditions of life on an unpredictable, heating planet? Tunelling through time and space, this lecture will explore the reasons for our fascination with Apocalypse, from Christian eschatology to zombie fiction. We are going to see how end-of-time talk serves as a rhetoric of social legitimation and how its political force can be disrupted.

About the speaker

Florian Mussgnug is Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian Studies at UCL, where he also serves as Vice Dean International in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. He holds a professorial double appointment at the University of Rome III and is an affiliated researcher at the University of Heidelberg's Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. In 2022, he was elected to a life membership of Academia Europaea.

Photo credit

Lorenzo Terranera, "Fifa nera fifa blu" (2017), courtesy of the artist.