The Council for European Studies is pleased to announce Rouven Symank (Free University Berlin) and Erika Huckestein (Widener University) as the winners of the 2025 European Studies First Article Prize.
Rouven Symank (Free University Berlin) is the winner of the Social Sciences Award for their article, “Durkheim’s Empire: The Concept of Solidarity and Its Colonial Dimension” (American Political Science Review, 2024).
Rouven Symank is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the SCRIPTS Cluster of Excellence, Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI), an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics (LSE), and an M.A. from Humboldt University of Berlin. He has held visiting research positions at the University of Oxford, Sciences Po Paris, and the University of California, Berkeley.
His research combines political theory with qualitative methods to explore questions of solidarity, justice, and the challenges facing democracy. His latest work appeared in the American Political Science Review (APSR). He is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Global Politics of Cultural Restitution, which analyzes the return of cultural heritage as a site of international norm contestation and a catalyst for deeper normative debates on property, justice, and historical reconciliation.
He also serves as lead editor of a peer-reviewed special issue on cultural policy and as Principal Investigator of The Restitution Think Tank, a project funded by the Berlin University Alliance. His research has been recognized with the Dahrendorf Fellowship at Oxford and the EUI, the Charles V European Award Research Grant, and support from the German Academic Exchange Service and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Beyond academia, he has gained professional experience in public policy as a Carlo-Schmid Fellow at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) in New York.
In 2026, he will join Harvard University as a John F. Kennedy Fellow.
Erika Huckestein (Widener University) is the winner of the Humanities Prize for their article: “From Cradle to Grave: The Politics of Peace and Reproduction in the Anti-Fascist Campaigns of British Women’s Organisations” (Contemporary European History, 2024).
Erika Huckestein is an Assistant Teaching Professor in History at Widener University. Her research focuses on the themes of political engagement, gender, and social movements in Britain and Europe. Her current book project Confronting Dictatorship: The Anti-Fascist Politics of British Women’s Organizations examines a series of anti-fascist campaigns pursued by British feminist organizations from 1923 to 1951 and considers the ways in which the women’s movement was a central part of the anti-fascist movement in Britain after the First World War. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019.