The Trans-Atlanticist

In light of the pending rollback of abortion rights by the US Supreme Court's conservative majority, Stefanie Schäfer and her guest Judith Rauscher turn to a world without men--as imagined in literary texts from the turn of the 20th century. Reading feminist utopias such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) and Mary E. Bardley's Mizora. A Prohpecy (1880/9), they discuss literary representa...

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 d...

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 ou...

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 descen...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 p...

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...

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 p...

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 selec...

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.