The Trans-Atlanticist: Recent Episodes
Andrew Sola
Andrew Sola explores the past, present, and future of relations between Europe and the United States with scholars, artists, authors, politicians, journalists, and business leaders. Based at the Amerikazentrum in Hamburg, the Trans-Atlanticist provides you with insights from the thought leaders who are shaping the trans-Atlantic relationship every single day.
In this episode, Andrew Sola and the Trans-Atlanticist's EU expert Guenter Danner discuss the French election rematch between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. They then delve into the consequences of Viktor Orban's decisive victory in Hungary for the EU, Russia, and Ukraine.
With her guest Nele Sawallisch, Stefanie discusses Esi Edugyan's 2018 novel Washington Black. With Olaudah Equiano's 1789 autobiography as intertext, the novel entangles the adventure story with the slave narrative. As Washington Black travels from Barbados to the Arctic, from Virginia to London, his narrative asks about the (hi)stories that remain out of the light and the making of 19th century discoverer personas against the backdrop of gratuitous black labor.
War has returned to Europe. Andrew Sola and Dr. Guenter Danner, our EU expert, unpack what the war means for Ukraine, Russia, and the future of the continent. Was the West delusional in believing that trade and economic relations would prevent Russian aggression? Is Putin a madman or a rational actor? How will the war end?
In our first episode 2022, Lady Fiction takes a cue from Black History Month to ask about the legacies of black woman celebrities in the US cultural archive. Stefanie Schäfer's guest is Dr. Samantha Pinto (UTexas), author of Infamous Bodies. Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Duke UP 2020), whose work on transantional feminism and black women's performance inquires into our understanding of the "popular" in popular culture. Fans of Beyoncé will find their Queen B all over and across this episode, as we read from Morgan Parker's 2017 poetry collection There are More Beuatiful Things than Beyoncé.
This episode of LadyFiction discusses Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo’s “We Need New Names” (2013), a novel about a young girl who leaves behind her shantytown childhood to pursue her goals in America. The novel meditates on home, trauma, and childhood in a globalized world—and Stefanie Schäfer’s conversation partner is Oksana Marafioti, US-American writer of Armenian and Russian Romani descent and the author of “American Gypsy: A Memoir” (2012).
In the final episode of 2021, Andrew Sola and our resident EU expert Dr. Guenter Danner discuss EU refugee policy, the Dublin Agreement, and Fortress Europe; the challenges facing the new German coalition government in 2022; and the likely candidates in the French presidential election coming up in April.
This episode features Stefanie Schäfer and her guest Amanda Halter discussing their experiences in reading Louisa May Alcott's 1868/9 classic. We talk about Jo's meanings as tomboy and archetype of white womenhood, domesticity and nostalgia, and female authorship, touching also on Great Gerwig's 2019 film version--and finally, we wonder why Little Women continues to gather, as Anne Boyd Rioux and others have contended, a predominantly female readership.
In the final episode of the first series of Novel RomAntics, host Douglas Cowie and guest Gregory Miller, a Wisconsin-based educator, discuss Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, a novel that, while telling a story of opiate addiction in the USA, contemplates matters of science, faith, race, immigration, and family.
Do women have to choose between life as an artist and being a mother? That’s what the story boils (or burns!) down to in Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel (and in the eponymous Hulu Series) Little Fires Everywhere. In this episode, Stefanie Schäfer and her guest Julia Faisst discuss the implications and repercussions of this conflict—and on the side, they connect the abyss between itinerant freedom and the comforts of white settlement to the 2008 economic crisis, to adoption and white privilege, and to the iconicity of the American home in contemporary culture.
In this episode, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Los Angeles-based writer Ryan Gattis, discuss Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, a road novel about a family traveling from New York City to the Mexican-American border. Check out Ryan's novels at ryangattis.com.
In Oct 2021, aka the second fall after the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, many pressing questions persist: What will be our new normal? How will we construct our stories and our identities after COVID? Is the future, as many say, indeed female?
In this episode, Stefanie Schäfer and her guests, Ina Batzke and Linda Hess, explore two novels about global pandemics that were published before the arrival of COVID-19, and the answers these works of post-apocalyptic speculative fiction offer. They touch on female authors, alternate fictional universes, and the consequences wrought on humanity by the end of oil—and of the cultural industry, respectively .
In the second of two episodes about reinterpretations of The Great Gatsby, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Michael Coyle, discuss The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo, in which Daisy Buchanan's golf star friend Jordan Baker narrates a dark, fantastical and politically-charged version of the same events that Nick Carraway tells in Fitzgerald's 1925 novel.
Political correspondent Christina Neuhaus and host Andrew Sola discuss the upcoming federal elections in Germany. They cover the top six parties: CDU, SPD, the Greens, FDP, AFD, and the Left. Also, they assess the chances of the three candidates who seek to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel: Olaf Scholz, Armin Laschet, and Annalena Baerbock . Lastly, they analyze the effect of climate change, tax policy, and COVID-19 on the elections.
Marking the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Stefanie and her guest, Americanist Marius Henderson, discuss contemporary literature and the concept of American art after 9/11, touching on the affective turn, the New Sincerity, the Occupy Movement, and the aesthetics of sleep in the novel "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" (2018) by US novelist Ottessa Moshfegh.
In this show, Andrew Sola and his guest, Prof. Steven Durand, discuss different theoretical approaches to understanding US foreign policy and international security 20 years after 9/11. Topics include (1) realpolitik or neo-realism: the view that the world is an anarchical and amoral competition among nations; (2) Graham Allison’s critique of the assumption that governments make rational decisions; (3) James Dobbins’ analysis of successful and unsuccessful approaches to nation building. Next, they discuss the war in Afghanistan, including (4) the role of humanitarian intervention in US foreign policy; and (5) the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy. The show concludes with (6) an assessment of President Biden’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan as well as (7) a discussion of the Biden Doctrine.
In this episode, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Professor of English at Colgate University, Michael Coyle, discuss No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts. This is the first of two episodes in which Douglas and Michael discuss novels that are based in different ways on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby.
Dr. Trygve Svensson, director of the Norwegian think tank AGENDA, and Andrew Sola preview the upcoming elections in Norway on 13 September. Topics include antagonistic politics, social and economic inequality, climate change, and immigration. Lastly, Dr. Svensson remembers the tragic day of the terrorist bombing in Oslo and the subsequent mass shooting on the island of Utøya.
In this episode, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Professor Robert Eaglestone, discuss The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin, a novel set in Portland, Oregon that dramatizes the human cost of the economic crash. They also touch on the relationship between Willy Vlautin's fiction writing and his songwriting
With her guest, film expert and documentary maker Anna Sola, Stefanie Schäfer discusses the winning film of the 2021 Academy Awards, zooming in on visual anthropology, freedom and mobility, and feminist art in times of crisis.
With her guest Andrew Wildermuth, Stefanie Schaefer discusses the text that kicked off the white women's movement in the US, Margaret Fuller's 1845 "Woman in the 19th Century", interrogating its feminist meanings and transatlantic entanglements, and Fuller's concept of female genius.
In this episode, novelist Nadifa Mohamed and host Douglas Cowie discuss What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, a collection of short stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah. They discuss several of the stories, and the overlaps and differences in cultural expectations between the United States and Africa, the pressures of young womanhood, and more. Nadifa Mohamed's latest novel, The Fortune Men, is published by Penguin, and will be available in German from September, under the titel Der Geist von Tiger Bay, published by C.H. Beck Verlag.
Recorded on International Women's Day, LadyFiction’s episode 4 turns to the history of science—and the forgotten role black people played as study objects in this context. Stefanie Schäfer and Dr. Christine Vogt-William from the University of Bayreuth discuss how black women’s poetry unearths and retells these forgotten histories. We read Elizabeth Alexander’s poems “The Venus Hottentot” and selections from Marilyn Nelson’s “Fortune’s Bones” (2004) and from Bettina Judd’s “Patient” (2014). The poems selected showcase the Renaissance of the Black Arts in the current moment and its aesthetic of empowerment that gives a voice to those who have been silenced by History.
In this episode, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Classicist Hannah Bean, discuss Circe by Madeline Miller. The novel reimagines and retells the story of one of the characters Odysseus encounters in The Odyssey of Homer, and the discussion looks both at the roots of the story, other tellings of it, and some of the specifics of how Miller imagines these roots into a contemporary novel.
In this episode, host Andrew Sola and our resident EU expert Guenter Danner discuss challenges facing the EU's vaccination program. Also, they discuss the long-term economic consequences of the pandemic as well as challenges facing European social services post-pandemic. Lastly, they offer a preview of the upcoming federal elections in Germany in September.
In Episode 3, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, science fiction writer Adam Roberts, discuss The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, an ambitious novel set in the near future that tells the story of a global effort to slow impending environmental collapse. Please also see Adam Robert's post about the novel here https://sibilantfricative.blogspot.com/2020/10/kim-stanley-robinson-ministry-for.html
We celebrate Women's History Month with an episode about women and politics. In the second episode of LadyFiction Stefanie Schaefer discusses First Ladies and “First Lady Fiction” with her guest Dr. Katharina Gerund from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. In January 2021, the arrival of new First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, an educator who has said she will keep working during her time in the White House, garnered renewed debate about marriage, politics, and modern womanhood. In this episode of LadyFiction, we turn to Curtis Sittenfeld’s bestselling novel American Wife (2008), a fictional autobiography of Laura Bush, First Lady from 2001-2009.
March is Irish-American Heritage Month in the United States. In Episode #2 of NovelROMANtics, host Douglas Cowie and his guest Shane Carmichael discuss Apeirogon by Colum McCann, an Irish storyteller living in New York. They discuss the intersection of storytelling, conflict, and global politics with respect to McCann's multifaceted novel.
The Trans-Atlanticist launches its second new podcast series called LadyFiction. In the first episode, our host Dr. Stefanie Schaefer and her guest Prof. Alexandra Ganser-both from the University of Vienna-discuss Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. February is African-American History Month, and these books were chosen because Butler's Earthseed series provide profound insights into black history and culture.
February is African-American History month in the United States, and the Trans-Atlanticist is celebrating with a number of podcasts about African-American authors. For this first episode of NovelROMANtics, host Dr. Douglas Cowie and his guest, Dr. Oli Belas of University of Bedfordshire, discuss a pair of crime novels by Attica Locke: Blue Bird, Blue Bird and Heaven, My Home, both of which follow black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews as he tries to unravel the truth of a complicated set of white-supremacist hate crimes in rural East Texas.
Dr. Stefanie Schäfer discusses the cultural history of the “first family,” the concept of civil religion in the US, the development of the academic specialty of First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) studies, the significance of the Obama presidency for race relations and identity politics, as well as the cultural impact of Michele Obama’s new autobiography, Becoming.
Renowned economist and expert on international trade, Prof. Gabriel Felbermayr explains President Trump’s economic policies. Topics include the Trump tax cuts, US-EU trade imbalances, Nordstream2, energy security, and Iran sanctions, as well as forecasts about the future of the US and the global economy.
On November 6, 2018, Americans went to polling places across the US to cast their votes in the mid-term elections. Prof. Bierling, a leading expert in transatlantic relations, discusses the election results and the consequences for the United States, Germany, and transatlantic relations in general.
Fifty years after the Prague Spring, Dr. Thomas Murphy discusses his new book, Czechoslovakia Behind the Curtain: Life, Work, and Culture in the Communist Era. Dr. Murphy and host Andrew Sola explore the history of Czechoslovakia, the events that led to the Prague Spring, the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, and the lives of ordinary people under communist rule. The episode ends with a discussion of recent political developments in central Europe.
Dr. Alexander Phillips and Andrew Sola chart the history of ecological thinking and the origins of ecocriticism as a scholarly discipline and then discuss the importance of the environment in the works of German authors Wilhelm Raabe and Adalbert Stifter. The episode ends by assessing the importance of ecocriticism in the present.
In the June 2018 edition of “This Month at the EU with Dr. Danner,” Andrew Sola and EU insider Guenter Danner discuss Europe’s immigration and refugee crisis, the Latvian banking scandals, and the end of the Greek bailout.
In the April 2018 edition of “This Month at the EU with Dr. Danner,” Andrew Sola and EU insider Guenter Danner discuss the elections in Hungary, the state of the Greek economy at the end of the bailout, and China’s influence on the EU.
Professor Dieter Schulz and Andrew Sola discuss Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and its influence on Dr. Martin Luther King.
German-American basketball legend Wilbert Olinde, Jr., and Andrew Sola discuss ways to maximize one’s potential, learn from life’s challenges, and cope with daily stresses. They also discuss immigration politics in Germany and lessons from Dr. Martin Luther King.
In the first installment of “This Month at the EU with Dr. Danner,” Andrew Sola and EU insider Dr. Guenter Danner discuss the elections in Italy, the formation of a coalition government in Germany, the latest in the Brexit negotiations, the effect of Trump’s tax cuts on the European economy, and Russian-EU relations.
Gideon Marks, from the Google Incubator Accelerator in Silicon Valley, discusses product creation, team building, mentorship, data privacy, Industry 4.0, as well as the importance of values and ethics in start-ups.
Torsten Jahnke from the American Poster Institute and Andrew Sola discuss the history of gig posters in the USA and Europe as well as gig posters as an art form.
Jackson Janes and Andrew Sola discuss how different presidents have affected the trans-Atlantic relationship in their first years before looking specifically at German-American relations during the course of Donald Trump’s first year.
Guenter Danner, our expert on the EU, and Andrew Sola discuss the riots at the US Capitol as well as the upcoming elections in Germany, the Brexit trade deal, and the EU-China Investment Treaty.