Dr. William E.B. Sherman has been awarded a fellowship to the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. As a CAPAS Hamburger Fellow in Heidelberg, Dr. Sherman will be expanding on work from his first book (Singing with the Mountains, forthcoming in 2023 from Fordham University Press) by exploring "the global apocalyptic in early modern Afghanistan." Reading across a wide range of sources—cryptic esoteric accounts of the end times in Persian, Jesuit missionary journals, Sikh poetry, and the chronicles of royal courts—Dr. Sherman will explore how Afghanistan was a site of encounter and exchange: a place where people from multiple religious traditions, cultural and class backgrounds, and linguistic communities gathered to swap stories on the End of the World. These apocalyptic encounters in Afghanistan had tremendous effects on early modern imaginations from Europe to Asia. While in Heidelberg, Dr. Sherman will be meeting with other CAPAS fellows to collaborate on studies of the apocalypse that reach across disciplines, departments, and geographies. Assuming the world doesn't end, he'll be back in Charlotte for the Fall of 2024.
