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.