The Trans-Atlanticist

In this episode, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Professor Michael Coyle, discuss Carl Sandburg's 1919 collection, Chicago Poems. They interpret a handful of poems, including his most famous poem, Chicago, which begins with the memorable lines: "Hog butcher of the World / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat / Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler / Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of Big Shoulders." Also, they assess Sandburg's place in American poetry more generally.

On December 7, 2022, German police announced that they had uncovered a plot to overthrow the government and install a new king of Germany. Who are these seditionists, known as Reichsbürger or citizens of the Reich? What are their goals? How do they interact with other extremist groups in Germany? What can the German government do-and what can't it do-to manage the evolving threats of home-grown extremism?

Andrew Sola and Günter Danner answer these questions in this special episode of The Trans-Atlanticist Politics Podcast.

Andrew Sola of the Amerikazentrum-Hamburg teams up with Sarah Wagner and David Sirakov of the Atlantische Akademie in Rheinland-Pfalz to analyze the 2022 mid-term elections in the United States.

What lessons can we learn about the health of American democracy? What issues are driving American voters? How is Donald Trump's influence on American politics evolving? What can we expect between now and the next presidential election in 2024?

This podcast episode is a cooperation between The Trans-Atlanticist and the Atlantische Akademie's podcast, Amerikas Verfassung: Politik und Gesellschaft in den USA. It will be published on both podcast channels. Please show your support for transatlantic relations by subscribing!

With Dr. Cedric Essi, Stefanie Schäfer talks about the legacy of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, a mainstay of US culture and a holiday classic, and the politics of the 1991 “unauthorized parody” The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, in which Scarlett’s black half- sister Cynara tells a very different family story. She asks readers to discard Confederate nostalgia and white melodrama and to dismantle Gone with the Wind’s status as cultural monument to the Lost Cause.

In this episode, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, Professor Robert Eaglestone discuss The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon, published in 2008. The conversation looks at the novel's structure, and its development of themes of immigrant and refugee identity, ethnic cleansing, trauma, language, and much more.

In this episode, Stefanie Schaefer and her guest Savage Bear (Cree) commemorate Native American Heritage Month. They discuss sensuality and the politics of decolonizing sexuality in contemporary indigenous art. They address indigenous interventions in academic discourses, read poetry by Richard van Camp (Tłı̨chǫ Dene) and Tenille Campbell (Dene/Métis), and talk about moose lips and feminist body sovereignty.

In this episode, host Douglas Cowie and his guest, poet and teacher Alina Borger, discuss The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. They begin by exploring why the novel makes for useful study on a high school curriculum, and move to a wide-ranging discussion of its place as a novel of Chicago, its structure, and the many themes that emerge from its center as a novel about a Latina girl's tentative steps towards adolescence.

The Amerikazentrum Hamburg commemorates Kurt Vonnegut's 100th birthday with a special podcast about his seminal novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The Amerikazentrum will also be hosting a Virtual Vonnegut Birthday Celebration live on ZOOM on Saturday Nov. 19 from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. CET. The expert panel includes Dr. Wieland Schwanebeck, Vonnegut biographer Charles J. Shields, and Jan-Christian Petersen. Please visit our website to register for the event: amerikazentrum.de.

In this episode, our experts explore the effects of Russia's war in Ukraine on European energy policy and EU politics. A number of countries are analyzed, including Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, and the Baltics. The episode ends with a moral and legal assessment of EU policy regarding Russian draft dodgers.

In this episode, Sola and Danner examine the recent elections in Sweden and Italy. Both nations experienced an enormous surge in votes for far-right parties. Is the European electorate moving to the right? Are are far-right parties moving to the center? Join us as we explore the history of Swedish and Italian politics over the last 100 years.