The Council for European Studies is pleased to announce Henry McDaniel (University of Pennsylvania) and Joshua Ovadia (Swarthmore College) as the winners of the 2025 Undergraduate Paper Prize.
Henry McDaniel (University of Pennsylvania) won the prize for their thesis, “An Uncertain Future for EU Enlargement: Russian Hybrid Warfare in Georgia, Moldova, and Serbia.”
Henry McDaniel is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and a 2025-2026 Fulbright Scholar to Moldova, where he will be teaching English. At Penn, McDaniel was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar who earned a BA in Russian and East European Studies and Diplomatic History, Magna Cum Laude. He was a Perry World House Student Fellow, a Penn Abroad Leader, and was a 2024 Hertog Foundation Security Studies Fellow. In 2023, he was awarded a Global Research Internship grant to study wine, heritage and hospitality at a world renowned winery in Porto, Portugal. In 2022, he completed an internship at the Penn Museum’s Center for Cultural Heritage, where he helped create a database being used to track the destruction of cultural heritage sights in Ukraine. McDaniel also spent time learning Russian in Narva, Estonia on a National Security Language Initiative for Youth. His thesis, entitled An Uncertain Future for EU Enlargement: Russian Hybrid Warfare in Georgia, Moldova and Serbia, focuses on how Russian hybrid warfare is stalling European Union enlargement in Eastern Europe. Outside of academics, McDaniel was a resident advisor in Riepe College House, a tenor saxophonist for Penn Jazz, and an avid cook.
Joshua Ovadia (Swarthmore College) won the prize for their thesis, “Divergent Goals, Convergent Outcomes: The Labor Movement in Jerez.”
Joshua Ovadia is a passionate student of history with a deep interest in Spanish labor history and the Franco era. He earned his undergraduate degree in History from Swarthmore College, graduating with Highest Honors. Though Spanish history constituted his major area of research, he also engaged with modern Middle Eastern political economy, decolonial interpretative theories of the Renaissance, and the intersections between anthropological study and the law in theory and practice during his time at Swarthmore.
Outside of academia, Joshua competed for Swarthmore Mock Trial for all four years of his college career. A lifelong vocalist, he continues to sing in a variety of choral, a cappella, operatic, and musical theater contexts in his new home in Madison, Wisconsin.
Today, Joshua works as a Project Manager at Epic Systems, where he helps health systems implement large-scale software transformations. He remains intellectually engaged by participating in local arts and historical communities. Joshua is honored to be recognized and looks forward to future work that combines historical analysis with interdisciplinary inquiry.