CMEMS Alumnus Lane Baker Awarded 2026 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize

Lane Baker (Ghent University; History PhD '25, and former CMEMS Workshop Coordinator) is the winner of the 2026 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize, for "From Encounter to Expulsion: Romani Immigrants in the Holy Roman Empire, 1417-1498." 

The prize is awarded annually by the Friends of the German Historical Institute for the best doctoral dissertation on a topic in German history written at a North American university.

Read the Prize Committee's Laudatio below. Congratulations, Lane! 

The committee would like to express appreciation to all the nominees for their outstanding work. Our review of the nominations brought home to us the particular challenges faced by this cohort of doctoral students. They experienced familiar dissertation struggles--moving to new cities, accessing archives, and fostering professional and personal relationships—yet they did so in the midst of a global pandemic. We also would like to collectively acknowledge contributions of faculty advisors as well as the archive, library, and museum staffs who aided them along the way. Despite difficult times, the field remains robust. The dissertations reflected a broad and diverse chronological, geographic, and thematic range. The nominees proved deeply immersed in historiography even as they boldly ventured into new narratives and insights. It was a pleasure to do this reading.

Dr. Lane Baker

"From Encounter to Expulsion: Romani Immigrants in the Holy Roman Empire, 1417-1498."

Department of History, Stanford University

Dissertation Committee: Professor Rowan Dorin (Chair), Professor Fiona Griffiths, Professor Laura Stokes

The committee commends Dr. Lane Baker for his truly breathtaking dissertation, "From Encounter to Expulsion: Romani Immigrants in the Holy Roman Empire, 1417-1498." With painstaking care, Baker excavates traces of one of the last great migrations in the European Middle Ages and explores the dynamic interplay between arriving and receiving communities. He reveals a world filled with contingencies and unknowns, one in which xenophobia and expulsion were not the first, nor the only responses to newcomers.

The reader simply cannot miss the scope and depth of Baker’s scholarship The bibliography spans eighty pages and includes nearly seventy archives, libraries, and museums across multiple countries. Yet, this list merely hints at the dissertation’s methodological range and precision. Baker’s close reading of texts is inspired. Rather than relying only on printed editions of chronicles, Baker sought out the archival originals, identified alterations, and recovered omissions. In doing so, he revealed these sources as richer and more layered than previously imagined. Baker authenticates letters of safe conduct by cross-referencing them with royal itineraries. Through a combination of medieval evidence and shrewd detective work, Baker pinpoints overlapping locations and dates within a matter of miles and days. From imperial charters to municipal account books, he extracts administrative categories and ways of thinking at all levels of governance. Baker charts the evolution of literary and visual tropes in popular dramas, tapestries, and even medical manuscripts. Baker’s deep dive into German dialects is both erudite and eminently readable. And the findings are profoundly important. By drawing on a vast collection of sources and his remarkable linguistic skills, Baker ascertains the presence and the agency of Romani immigrants in a time before the more familiar historical terms for identifying them had emerged or solidified.

At the same time, Baker shows remarkable sensitivity to the limits of his archive, teasing out the voices of the Roma, even within these oftentimes hostile depictions. His sources are mostly by non-Romani observers—municipal authorities, chroniclers, and ecclesiastical institutions. He is explicit that he does not, and cannot, claim to recover Romani voices in any direct sense. Rather than treating this as a problem to be solved, Baker makes it central to his analysis. The categories through which Romani people were understood—pilgrims, guests, imposters—are themselves products of these documentary frameworks. What we see, then, is not simply Romani experience, but the processes by which that experience was interpreted, constrained, and ultimately transformed into grounds for exclusion.

The dissertation is equally impressive in its command of the broader historiography. Baker engages with multiple bodies of scholarship—on late medieval migration, charity, urban regulation, the history of marginality, and modern views of the Roma—without ever losing sight of his central argument. The significance of Baker’s findings resonated deeply with each committee member, across the centuries and diverse themes of our expertise. We are delighted that this dissertation will inspire and guide research in many fields for years to come.

Sincerely,

The 2026 Fritz Stern Prize Committee

Molly Loberg (Chair, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo)

Amy Leonard (Georgetown University)

Michelle Kahn (University of Richmond)