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German History Society Essay Prize

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German History Society Essay Prize, German History , Volume 27, Issue 2, April 2009, Page 270, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghp006

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The German History Society (GHS), in association with the Royal Historical Society (RHS), will award a prize of £500 to the winner of their annual essay competition. In addition, the article will be considered for publication in German History.

The prize will be presented to the winner at the Annual General Meeting of the GHS in October 2009.

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Essay Prize Winners 2021

The joint winners of this year’s GHS Essay prize are:

Katherine Arnold  (LSE) for ‘ German Natural History Collectors and the Pursuit of Desiderata in Early Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa. ‘

Emma Teeworte  (Oxford) for ‘” Es wäre besser, wenn man es wegmachen würde”: abortion and the Nazi past in Weinheim and Garmisch, c. 1951.’

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GSA Prize for the Best Essay in German Studies by a Graduate Student

This prize is awarded to the best unpublished, article-length manuscript written by a graduate student during the previous year. The prize winner is recognized at the annual banquet of the GSA, and a revised version of the essay will be published in  German Studies Review .

2023 Recipient of the Graduate Student Essay Prize

In his essay, “The Reception of Homoeroticism in the Works of Karl May: A Case Study in the Intellectual History of Sexuality in Post-War Germany,” Christian Meyer brilliantly excavates and analyzes a high-temperature debate among scholars, writers, and Karl May enthusiasts about the disputed presence and ultimate meaning of homoeroticism in the life and work of Karl May. The author shows that this debate was shaped by larger changes in West German society, culture, and politics during the 1960s and the 1970s, particularly the movement to decriminalize homosexuality and changing understandings of the Nazi past, specifically the relationship between Nazism and sexuality. Meyer convincingly argues that the reception of homoeroticism in Karl May’s work can shed new light on the intellectual and cultural history of sexuality in postwar West Germany. He points to the important role that psychoanalytic ideas, shaped by the Nazis and vulgarized in postwar decades, played in the debate on May’s homoeroticism and in the continuing pathologization of homosexuality, even after it was largely decriminalized in 1969. “The Reception of Homoeroticism in the Works of Karl May,” is a creative and ambitious essay. It is based on a robust and unique source base and engages intelligently with the relevant historiography. The committee congratulates Christian Meyer on his engaging and insightful contribution to the history of sexuality and Karl May studies in postwar West Germany.

Previous recipients of the Graduate Student Essay Prize

2022 Winner of the GSA Prize for the Best Essay in German Studies by a Graduate Student: Qingyang Freya Zhou (University of California-Berkeley): “‘A Temporality of Imminent, Never-Consummated Arrival’: Contemporary German Documentaries on North Korea” 2022 Prize Committee: Laurie Johnson (U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Committee Chair), Carl Gelderloos (SUNY Binghamton), and Jon Olson (UMass Amherst). Laudatio:

Zhou’s essay uses close readings of contemporary documentaries to re-assess socialist experiments in the 20th century, as well as to illuminate the status of political documentary in the 21st. The stakes of the argument and the importance of Zhou’s intervention into scholarship on contemporary documentary are immediately clear and Zhou’s transnational analysis (two Germanies/two Koreas) is especially noteworthy given that it is very difficult to do nuanced, accurate, in-depth transnational analysis that preserves important historical and cultural differences while also creating compelling synchronicities or affinities between the nations/places discussed. Zhou’s paper does just that, while it is also multi-vectored, as she considers affinities and ruptures between portrayals and perceptions of the two Germanies and the two Koreas in different eras. In other words, the paper is spatially and temporally complex while also displaying coherence and accessibility. The readings of the individual films are masterfully done; they are specific even as they develop broader themes (such as the similarities and differences between German and Korean notions of “home” and the ways in which the film My Brothers and Sisters in the North is and is not a Heimatfilm). The committee congratulates Qingyang Freya Zhou on this impressive contribution to transnational German Studies.

2022 Honorable Mention, German Studies Association Graduate Student Essay Prize:

David Takamura, University of North Carolina-Duke University: “Answering Egoism: Tieck’s Alternative Theory of Romantic Irony” Laudatio:

The honorable-mention essay by David Takamura is an ambitious, energetic defense of Ludwig Tieck’s literary work with irony. The committee was most impressed with the compelling ways in which Takamura reclaims literature as philosophy. The paper demonstrates admirable knowledge of Early Romanticism and its core concepts. By re-reading Tieck’s William Lovell , Takamura re-defines Romantic irony in ways that may well bring it closer to its Idealist origins. He persuasively defends irony against accusations of solipsism and subjectivism, something that the earliest Romanticism arguably also did. In so doing, Takamura resituates our understanding of Romantic irony (moving it most prominently away from its latest definitions by Friedrich Schlegel) and also shows that literature can be a place for an invigorating working-through of philosophical debates and issues.

2021 Winner of the GSA Prize for the Best Essay in German Studies by a Graduate Student: Philip Decker (Princeton University): “Wagner in Moscow, Glinka in Berlin: An Exchange of Operas during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Years” 2021 Prize Committee: A. Dana Weber (Florida State University; Committee Chair), Eric Kurlander (Stetson University), and Ervin Malakaj (University of British Columbia). Laudatio:

Philip Decker was awarded the 2021 GSA Prize for the Best Essay by a Graduate Student for “Wagner in Moscow, Glinka in Berlin: An Exchange of Operas during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Years.” The essay concerns the brief period of rapprochement between the USSR and Nazi Germany 1939-1941. Decker brings this era to life through an innovative examination of a set of opera performances that call into question received understandings about the cultural transfer between the two countries at that time. The essay expands existing historiography by means of a nuanced cross-medial analysis of the productions’ complex political, artistic, and social contexts. It considers their emergence and reception and thereby uncovers how those involved found value in the cultural exchanges surrounding the productions and were genuinely invested in these exchanges. “Wagner in Moscow, Glinka in Berlin: An Exchange of Operas during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Years” challenges views that consider the period’s German-Russian relations as fundamentally insincere and self-interested. On the contrary, as Decker demonstrates, cultural exchanges—no matter how politically controlled—generated open-ended artistic outcomes not entirely subject to political lockstep. Decker’s command of big-picture historiography, which the essay carefully brings in conversation with individual artistic practices, impressed the committee. As did the author’s ingenuity and sophistication in developing the analysis that eloquently brings together transnational expertise and methodology to examine a complicated and controversial historical topic.

2021 Honorable Mention, German Studies Association Graduate Student Essay Prize:

Kimberly Cheng, New York University: “The Trial of Lam See-Woh: Chinese Men and German Women in Hamburg, 1933–1947” Laudatio:

Kimberly Cheng was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2021 GSA Prize for the Best Essay by a Graduate Student with the submission “The Trial of Lam See-Woh: Chinese Men and German Women in Hamburg, 1933–1947.” This essay offers important insights about the history of racialization of Chinese men in Germany during the Nazi era and the first years after its end. It does so by carefully reconstructing the turbulent relationship between a Chinese man and a German woman by drawing on various official documents. The submission persuasively offers what would be an urgent study detailing the complexities attending interracial relationality that complicates assumptions about citizenship, gender, and race during this period. The committee was impressed with the meticulous archival work and contextualization of the documents.

2020 Prize Competition

Due to the pandemic, there was no prize awarded in 2020.

2019 Winner Announced

The GSA Prize for the Best Essay by a Graduate Student written in 2018 was awarded to Peter B. Thompson (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) for his essay “Wardens of the Toxic World: German Women’s Encounters with the Gas Mask, 1915-1945.” It will be published in a forthcoming issue of the German Studies Review .

Here is the prinze committee’s laudatio :

“Wardens of the Toxic World: German Women’s Encounters with the Gas Mask, 1915-1945,” brilliantly establishes the relationship between gender and the gas mask to show how women carved out military and technological spaces for themselves within the patriarchal world of Weimar and Nazi Germany. In cogent and persuasive prose, the author demonstrates the continuities of gendered expectations over time and the limited reach of the so-called New Woman, arguing that the specific needs of the state to educate the public about gas masks and proper procedures during air raids offered a different form of “emancipation” for women – one that took advantage of, instead of challenging, dominant norms. Impressive about “Wardens of the Toxic World” is its command of the complexity of the place of the gas mask in both real life and the social and technological imaginary of the period. Technical knowledge of chemistry and 21 industrial techniques is connected with analysis of political developments and cultural discourses culled from a wide range of primary texts and cultural objects, which are examined critically both in their own right and in the context of previous research. The author effectively brings together multiple strands of historiography into a whole greater than the sum of its equally fascinating parts.

Prize Committee: Sara Hall (University of Illinois at Chicago, chair), Stephen Lazer (Arizona State University), Peter McIsaac (University of Michigan). 

2018 Winner Announced

The winner is Matthias Müller (Cornell University) for his essay, “Rifts in Space-Time:   Carl Weiskopf in the Soviet Union.” The essay will be published in a future issue of the German Studies Review.

Here is the prize committee’s laudatio :

This year the members of the committee were pleased to receive many strong essay submissions, but we all agreed that this essay stood out for a number of reasons. Müller’s essay is commendable for his ability to present a sophisticated and complex argument about genre in a work that is well-organized and polished as well as accessible and thought-provoking for scholars across multiple disciplines. Müller provides readers with a clear roadmap of his paper and his essay evinces extensive reading and a solid command of primary and secondary sources. Müller argues that Franz Carl Weiskopf’s writing about his travels in the newly-formed Soviet Union blurs the distinction between literature and history, evoking a notion of montage through the transgression of genre conventions of travel writing. Müller carefully shows how Weiskopf brings together the concepts of experience and expectation in an era of high anticipation and excitement for the new socialist project. Weiskopf was not simply narrating his experiences, but connecting a teleological interpretation of the past and the hopes for the future of the Soviet experiment. Müller’s essay demonstrates skillful close reading and interpretation through its comparison and contrast of Weiskopf’s positions on a number of key issues in travel writing: fact vs. fiction; subjectivity vs. objectivity; space vs. time with those of his contemporaries. Importantly, Müller situates Weiskopf's work and approach to travel writing in the context of the period (1920s-1930s) and makes a persuasive case for continued cross-disciplinary scholarly interest in Weiskopf's ambitious project some 90 years later.

Prize committee: Margaret Lewis (University of Tennessee–Martin, chair), Holly Yanacek (James Madison University), Peter Yoder (Independent Scholar).

2017 Winner Announced

The winner is  Claudia Kreklau  (Emory University), for her essay on “Travel, Technology, and Theory: The Aesthetics of Ichthyology during the Second Scientific Revolution.” It will be published in a forthcoming issue of the  German Studies Review .

Here is the prize committee’s  laudatio :

On behalf of the GSA Committee charged with deciding the 2017 Graduate Student Essay Prize, we are delighted to present the Committee’s choice of the essay,  “Travel, Technology, and Theory: The Aesthetics of Ichthyology during the Second Scientific Revolution , ”  by  Claudia Kreklau , Emory University. The decision was very easy, with all judges independently coming to the same verdict. Most immediately, the essay stood out for its clear organization, its accessible, lucid writing, and its deep level of research. Each of the reviewers independently noted that they could understand this essay even though the topic was beyond their own area of expertise. I would like to highlight that this—understandability—was a key reason for the unanimous nomination, because presenting research such that a wide audience can follow and find it interesting is a skill that is sometimes underappreciated in the academic world. Yet Claudia Kreklau achieved just that, and we hope she will continue to nurture that skill as she advances in her career. The essay posits that knowledge of the world was tied to three things—world travel, technology, and aesthetics—specifically using the example of fish/fishes, and how knowledge and appreciation of fish/fishes increased during the second scientific revolution around 1800. For the overwhelming majority of human existence, the sea was perceived as threatening, and creatures inhabiting that world below water were seen as ugly and horrid. Early naturalists encountered fish only in their dead form—slimy, pale, and smelly—and so it is not surprising that early representations of fish, in books, for instance, reflect that unpleasant perception. However, as this essay shows, between 1780 and 1840, perceptions of fish changed. Technological advances in printing with color plates contributed to that, as it became possible to depict fish in life-like colors. Advances in seafaring technology and underwater exploration, making travel safer and allowing more easily to observe fish alive in their natural surroundings surely were just as important for this shift in attitudes. The essay is based on a wealth of records and sources from all across Europe, including publications, scientific cabinet collections, and travel accounts. Whether one comes from the angle of the historian, or literary scholar, or naturalist, this essay offers innovative and persuasive perspectives on the intersection of the natural world with technology and human intervention. As Keklau shows, the emerging perception of the natural world shows many parallels in different cultural settings. Characteristic for central Europe is that here, attitudes toward the natural world were shaped by aesthetics and romanticism more than elsewhere in Europe.

Prize Committee: Professors Almut Spalding (Illinois College, chair), Margaret Lewis (University of Tennessee, Martin), and Jeffrey Luppes (Indiana University, South Bend).

2016 Winner Announced

The GSA is proud to announce that this year's Graduate Student Paper Prize for the best paper in German Studies written in 2014-15 is awarded to  Ariana Orozco , University of Michigan (now at Kalamazoo College): "The Objects of Remembrance: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Short Stories Alongside Contemporary Exhibitions of East German Material Culture." The essay will be published in a future issue of the  German Studies Review . The GSA congratulates her for her excellent achievement and thanks the selection committee for its outstanding work.

Here is the text of the committee's laudatio:

Ariana Orozco's well-argued and well-formulated essay, “The Objects of Remembrance: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Short Stories Alongside Contemporary Exhibitions of East German Material Culture” compares memory practices and objects of everyday life in museum exhibits and literature. Contrasting the 2012 exhibit “Fokus DDR” at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and the 2011 exhibit “aufgehobene Dinge” at the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR in Eisenhüttenstadt, the essay also demonstrates how Jenny Erpenbeck's two short story collections  Tand  (2001) and  Dinge, die verschwinden  (2009) narrate everyday life in East Germany through material culture and the intrusion of personal memory.

2015 Winner Announced

The GSA is proud to announce that this year's Graduate Student Paper Prize for the best paper in German Studies written in 2013-14 is awarded to  Katharina Isabel Schmidt  (Yale University) for her paper “Unmasking ‘American Legal Exceptionalism’: German Free Lawyers, American Legal Realists, and the Transatlantic Turn to ‘Life’, 1903-33.” Ms. Schmidt's paper will be published in a future issue of the  German Studies Review . The GSA congratulates her for her excellent achievement and thanks the selection committee for its outstanding work.

Katharina Isabel Schmidt’s paper “Unmasking ‘American Legal Exceptionalism”: German Free Lawyers, American Legal Realists and the Transatlantic Turn to ‘Life’, 1903-33,” employs a transnational methodology/transatlantic gaze to historicize the paradigm of American legal exceptionalism by way of comparing the American Legal Realist movement of the late 1920s, credited with fundamentally transforming American legal theory and practice, with the German Free Lawyers, a partially parallel reformist movement which failed to develop a comparable impact on the jurisprudential mainstream. The exploration of this configuration, and the factors contributing to it, is hugely impressive in its intellectual breadth and depth. Schmidt’s complex argumentation attends to political, socio-historical and institutional factors alike, and her sovereign presentation combines both broad historical strokes with attention to individual texts and transatlantic reception processes. With its transnational and transdisciplinary reach, this paper is exemplary for the kind of scholarship the German Studies Association aims to foster.

2014 Winner Announced

The GSA is proud to announce that this year's Graduate Student Paper Prize for the best paper in German Studies written in 2012-13 is awarded to  Amanda Randall  (University of Texas at Austin) for her paper "Austrian  Trümmerfilm : What a Genre’s Absence Reveals about National Postwar Cinema and Film Studies." The prize selection committee was chaired by Professor Katherine Aaslestad (History, University of West Virginia). The other committee members are Professor Daniel Magilow (German Studies, University of Tennessee, Knoxville) and Professor Larry Ping (History, Southern Utah University). Ms. Randall's paper will be published in a future issue of the  German Studies Review . The GSA congratulates her for her excellent achievement and thanks the selection committee for its outstanding work.

Amanda Randall's original, well-framed and comparative essay on post-war German and Austrian film “Austrian Trümmerfilm: What a Genre’s Absence Reveals about National Postwar Cinema and Film Studies” re-conceptualizes the genre of Trümmerfilm and highlights the scholarly biases about divisions between national cinemas.  In addressing a relatively under-explored area of film history falling between the Third Reich and the new German cinema of the 1960s, Randall’s essay offers a compelling argument for a comparative re-reading of German and Austrian cinemas that pays attention to “their aesthetic, narrative, and symbolic strategies, as well as their conditions of production and undergirding ideologies.” Ms. Randall demonstrates that such an approach enables us to expand the concept of Trümmerfilm and with it, the scope of postwar film history. Her well-written essay carefully considers both German and Austrian historiography clearly pointing out the artificial divisions cultivated by national scholarship and the conventional periodization of Trümmerfilm as she reframes the category of analysis to extend its analytical possibilities.  Ms. Randall provides strong evidence of wartime and post-war devastation represented in both national cinemas to seek a broader understanding of post-war film that understands Trümmerfilm as that which connects the audience to the war experience in order to foster a comparative cultural analysis.

2013 Winner Announced

The GSA is proud to announce that the winner of this year's Graduate Student Paper Prize for the best paper in German Studies written in 2012-13 is awarded to  Carl Gelderloos  (Cornell University) for his paper "Simply Reproducing Reality: Brecht, Benjamin, and Renger Patzsch on Photography." The prize selection committee was chaired by Professor  Anthony Steinhoff , Université de Montréal. The other members were Professors  Perry Myers , Albion College, and  Maiken Umbach , University of Nottingham. Mr. Gelderloos's paper will be published in a future issue of the  German Studies Review . The GSA congratulates him for his excellent achievement and thanks the selection committee for its outstanding work.

With his well crafted and insightful essay, "Simply Reproducing Reality: Brecht, Benjamin, and Renger Patzsch on Photography," Carl Gelderloos casts new light on contemporary debates over visual culture by reassessing some of the initial discussions on aesthetics, visual representation and technology during that iconic moment of cultural modernity, Weimar Germany. Highlighting the central place of a self consciously modern photography in Weimar era discourses on aesthetics and culture, Mr. Gelderloos brilliantly constructs a debate between Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, on the one hand, and a noted proponent of Neue Sachlichkeit in photography, Albert Ranger Patzsch, on the other, in order to expose the considerable reluctance of Weimar's cultural critics to embrace photography as a form of modern art and as an acceptable medium for representing reality. A fascinating contribution to our understandings of the conceptualization of nature and technology, with important implications for scholars of film, literature and theater, Mr. Gelderloos's essay also sharpens our awareness of the considerable gains, but also challenges, involved in bringing photography into the practice of writing history.

2012 Winner Announced

The GSA is proud to announce that the winner of this year’s Graduate Student Paper Prize for the best paper in German Studies written in 2011-12 is awarded to  Ari Linden  (Cornell University), for his paper “Beyond Repetition: Karl Kraus’s ‘Absolute Satire’.”

The prize selection committee was chaired by Professor  Kathrin Bower  (University of Richmond), and included Professors  Jennifer Miller  (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville) and  Zoe Lang  (University of South Florida). Mr. Linden’s paper will be published in a future issue of  German Studies Review . The GSA congratulates him for his excellent achievement and thanks the selection committee for its outstanding work.

Here is the text of the committee’s laudatio:

"The 2012 GSA Graduate Student Essay Prize committee is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s competition:  Ari Linden  (Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University) for his paper “Beyond Repetition: Karl Kraus’s ‘Absolute Satire’.” In his sophisticated and well-argued essay, Mr. Linden contrasts Karl Kraus’s dismissal of Heinrich Heine's writing as inauthentic satire with his praise for the work of Johann Nestroy in order to illuminate Kraus's concept of "absolute satire." For Kraus, satire must exceed the historical moment in which it was conceived so as to retain its currency over time, a quality he attributes to Nestroy but not to Heine. Linden then turns to Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit to explore Kraus’s own approach to satirical writing. Linden reads Die letzten Tage both as a satirical indictment of World War I and as a kind of handbook on satire as a literary form. He deftly combines a judicious selection of theoretical positions to evaluate Kraus’s use of satire as well as the criticisms leveled against him. Linden’s paper offers precisely the kind of historically contextualized, theoretically grounded, and critically astute analysis that characterizes the best German Studies scholarship and the committee congratulates Mr. Linden on his excellent work."

Graduate Student Essay Prize: Call for Nominations

2024 Prize Competition Announced

The prize for the Best Essay in German Studies by a Graduate Student will again be awarded in 2024. The deadline for nominations and submissions is 15 May 2024 . Papers should be 6,000-9,000 words in length (including foot-/endnotes). Manuscripts may be submitted in English or German, and must not have been published in any form or have been accepted for publication. The winner will be published in the German Studies Review .

Nominations, self-nominations, and submissions should be emailed to the committee chair via the link below.

• Rachel Halverson (University of Idaho, Chair)
• Brent Maner (Kansas State University)
• Klaus Mladek (Dartmouth College)

Questions may be directed to [email protected] .

Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism

Essay competition: Jung Chang and the Cultural Revolution

The subject of the 2024-25 sixth form essay prize is “Jung Chang and the Cultural Revolution”.

We are delighted to announced that Jung Chang herself will present the prizes at the awards ceremony next year.

Jung Chang’s book, Wild Swans , was an international sensation when it was published and has sold over 13 million copies around the world.  The book tells much of the story of modern China through the lives of her grandmother, her mother and herself. She herself became a Red Guard but became sickened by what she was expected to do. Her mother was paraded in the streets and made to walk on her knees on broken grass.

The competition is to write an essay in which the experiences of her family and the overall story of the Cultural Revolution are both told.

Click on this button for more information.

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Essay competition: repression in pre-war nazi Germany

The deadline for the 2023-2024 sixth form history essay prize has now passed. We received 125 entries from students at over 60 schools. The results have now been announced.

The Nazi ‘Pacification’ of Poland  

From The Devil’s Alliance by Roger Moorhouse

Warsaw Ghetto handstamp

The Warsaw Ghetto was established by the German occupying forces in November 1940.

Witold  Pilecki

A T55 tank purchased for exhibition

The kind of tank used to suppress the Prague Spring in 1968

German History Society Essay Prize – Entry Form

The entry form for the 2017 prize will appear here shortly.

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The 2023 German History Society postgraduate essay prize

The 2023 German History Society (UK) will award a prize of £500 to the winner of their annual postgraduate essay competition. In addition, the essay will be considered for publication in German History.

The prize will be presented to the winner at the Annual General Meeting of the GHS , 7-9 September in Birmingham. The Society will pay the cost of travel within the UK and Ireland for the winner to attend the AGM to receive the award.

A runner-up prize of £250 will also be awarded.

The deadline for entries for this year’s prize is 23 July 2023. Entries may be sent to  [email protected] .

• The essay can be on any aspect of German History, including the history of German-speaking people both within and beyond Europe. Papers drawing on research in primary sources and critical, methodological or theoretical essays are equally welcome.
• Any student registered for a postgraduate degree (master’s or doctoral) at a university in the UK or the Republic of Ireland is eligible to enter the competition. All postgraduates who submitted their dissertation within twelve months of the date of submission of the essay are also eligible.
• The text of the essay (exclusive of references and bibliography) must not exceed 10,000 words.
• The essay must be submitted in English.
• Manuscripts which are already in press or have been submitted for publication in another journal are not eligible for the prize.
• Unpublished PhD chapters are suitable as entries to the prize.

The Decision

• The essays submitted will be read by a jury of four historians.
• Bearing in mind the overall criterion of publishable quality, the jury will evaluate the submissions in terms of their originality, depth, scope and rigour, and the extent to which they make a new contribution to historical understanding, as well as qualities of style and presentation.
• The jury reserves the right not to award a prize in any particular year.
• The decision of the jury is final.
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Henrik Enderlein Prize 2024 awarded

Berlin/Paris, 12 June 2024. Alexandros Kentikelenis, Associate Professor of Political Economy and Sociology at Bocconi University, and Filip Kostelka, Professor and Chair of Political and Social Change at the European University Institute, are the winners of the 2024 Franco-German Henrik Enderlein Prize. Now in its third year, the research prize honours outstanding scholars under the age of 40 whose work contributes to the future of Europe. The prize honoured Kentikelenis and Kostelka for their work on democracy and social cohesion, as well as their civic engagement. In an honourable mention, digital governance scholar Roxana Radu (Oxford University) received the jury's commendatory recognition.

Professor Kentikelenis and Professor Kostelka were selected by an international jury chaired by Cornelia Woll, President of the Hertie School. The jury was convinced not only by the scientific excellence of the two researchers’ work but also their efforts to make the best of their results and to inform policymakers in their respective fields.

Henrik Enderlein Prize: Celebrating research on the future of Europe

The prize was awarded on the second day of the Hertie School’s Anniversary Forum “Europe at a crossroads: Looking back to move forward” celebrating 20 years of the Hertie School. Besides jury president Cornelia Woll, German State Minister for Europe and Climate Anna Lührmann and French Ambassador to Germany Francois Delattre were present at the ceremony.

The Henrik Enderlein Prize is endowed with 10,000 euros and was jointly established in 2022 by the Hertie School, Sciences Po in Paris, the German Federal Foreign Office, and the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.

Excellent research meets practical relevance

“With their research on governance and society in Europe, this year’s winners contribute to academic discussions on pressing challenges for democratic societies. We were impressed by their engagement with questions of participation and social justice in Europe. On behalf of the entire jury, I warmly congratulate them for their important work at the interface between academia and political practice,” Cornelia Woll , President of the Hertie School and President of the Henrik Enderlein Prize Jury, said at the ceremony.

Minister of State for Europe and Climate Anna Lührmann:

“Democracy, social cohesion, the green transition and the digital sphere are at the heart of European political debates. Politicians should make their decisions based on facts and scientific results. With their excellent work, this year's prize winners contribute to better policymaking. Thanks, and congratulations to them!”

French Minister of State for Europe Jean-Noël Barrot:

“In these times of rising populism, which seem to have simple answers, the Henrik Enderlein Prize is an important reminder that the rational individual is at the heart of our Europe, that reason and knowledge should remain our compass. As France celebrates the 80th anniversary of its own liberation this year, let’s look back at our history to move forward.”

Jeremy Perelman, Director of International Affairs at Sciences Po

"At a time when our continent must decide on its future, the Henrik Enderlein Prize demonstrates the major role of research and the humanities and social sciences in making a concrete contribution to the major issues of our time. This is also central to the ambition of Sciences Po, an international university open to the world, to make Europe one of the priorities of its teaching and research work. I would like to congratulate Alexandros Kentikelenis, Filip Kostelka and Roxana Radu on the excellence of their work."

Winners combine strong academic profile with dedicated civic engagement

Alexandros Kentikelenis is Associate Professor of Political Economy and Sociology at Bocconi University in Italy. His work focusses on political economy, globalisation and global governance, and social protection schemes. In the spirit of Henrik Enderlein, Kentikelenis is committed to ensuring that his research has impacts outside of academia and helps policymakers to combat inequality and strengthen social protection programmes. Among other activities, he serves as the Vice President of the National Centre for Social Solidarity situated in the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in Greece, the leading social policy organisation the country which advises the ministry on social policy issues.

Filip Kostelka is Professor and Chair of Political and Social Change at the European University Institute. His work focusses on political behaviour and citizen political participation. Kostelka’s work on voter turnout has been of interest to a variety of policymakers: he has advised the European Parliament, the Canadian Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform and Freedom House. Beyond his research, Kostelka has also been active in supporting students and scholars from the EU widening countries in Central and Eastern Europe. He heads the EUI’s SPS Summer Academy for EU master’s students with the specific aim of strengthening internationalisation and the quality of research in widening countries.

Roxana Radu , Associate Professor of Digital Technologies and Public Policy at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, studies digital governance and cyber security. Due to the policy-oriented nature of Radu’s work, she is an important adviser to many policymakers and other experts on regulatory innovations, serving as a member of the Advisory Group of the EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). She is also active in EU Cybernet, where she has supported EU cyber capacity-building activities like an annual training programme for diplomatic academies in Latin America.

About the Henrik Enderlein Prize

The Henrik Enderlein Prize is endowed with 10,000 euros and is awarded to young social scientists under the age of 40. The work of the prize winners demonstrates scientific excellence and provides a concrete contribution to public debates on the future of Europe. The Henrik Enderlein Prize is named in honour of the Hertie School’s late president, who was a strong advocate for Europe.

Jury members include Jury President Professor Cornelia Woll, President of the Hertie School; Jean Pisani-Ferry, Professor of Economics at Sciences Po; Dorit Geva, Professor of Politics and Gender at the University of Vienna; Jakob Vogel, Professor of History at Sciences Po; Sergei Guriev, Professor of Economics at Sciences Po; Professor Thurid Hustedt, Dean of Graduate Programmes at the Hertie School; Anna Schröder, Deputy Commissioner for Franco-German Cooperation at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and Léonor Guy, Deputy Secretary-General for Franco-German Cooperation at the German Federal Foreign Office.

About the Hertie School

The Hertie School in Berlin prepares exceptional students for leadership positions in government, business and civil society. The school offers master’s programmes, executive education and doctoral programmes, distinguished by interdisciplinary and practice-oriented teaching, as well as outstanding research. Its extensive international network positions it as an ambassador of good governance, characterised by public debate and engagement. The school was founded in 2004 by the Hertie Foundation, which remains its major funder. The Hertie School is accredited by the state and the German Science Council. www.hertie-school.org

Press contact

Hertie School Benjamin Stappenbeck, Director of Communications Tel.: +49 (0)30 259 219 113 Email: [email protected]

Auswärtiges Amt Tel.: +49 (0)30 5000 2056 Email: [email protected]

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Université Sciences Po Romain Becker, Associate Press Tel.: +33 (0) 1 45 49 50 79 Email: [email protected]

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