Hello and welcome to EU today, a podcast from the Center for European Studies, a Jean-Monnais Center of Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thank you to the Erasmus Plus program of the European

Commission, the EU delegation to the U.S., and the U.S. Department of Education for supporting

our center and its programs. On this podcast, we sit down with scholars and policy leaders to discuss

pressing issues facing the European Union. We hope you enjoy it.

Hello and welcome to EU today.

My name is Mackenzie Hansen and I am a contemporary European studies major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In this episode, I speak with Professor Milada Anna Vacadova.

She is an associate professor of political science at UNC. Chapel Hill,

who specializes in the study of democratization in Europe post-communism, EU enlargement,

and the influence of international politics at the domestic scale. She received her doctor

philosophy from the University of Oxford in 1997. In 2020, Professor Vacadova published an article entitled

Ethno-populism and Democratic backsliding in Central Europe. She spoke about her research in the

March 9th symposium, race, human rights, and populism in Poland, co-sponsored by the EU

Center at the University of Illinois and the UNC Jean Monnet Center of Excellence.

I spoke with Professor Vacadova following the event.

Okay, so thank you so much for meeting with me today,

Professor Vacadova.

Just have a couple of questions for you and I think we'll just get started.

So first off, why do you study the transatlantic relationship?

And then on that vein, how do or could politics in the Europe slash the EU inform or resonate with American trends?

So that's a great question. So I started studying European politics and American politics a bit

...