The Trans-Atlanticist

With her guest, film expert and documentary maker Anna Sola, Stefanie

With her guest Andrew Wildermuth, Stefanie Schaefer discusses the text

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.

LadyFiction’s episode 4 turns to the history of science—and the

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.

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.