Stefan Rinke (born December 31, 1965) is a German historian and specialist in Latin American history. Since 2005 he has been professor at the Institute of Latin American Studies and at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin.
Biography
After graduating from the Gymnasium Julianum in Helmstedt in 1984, Stefan Rinke studied history and American studies in Bamberg and Bowling Green (Ohio) from 1985 to 1990. He completed his studies in 1989 with a Master of Arts in Bowling Green and in 1990 with a diploma in history in Bamberg. The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung supported him with a doctoral scholarship from 1991 to 1993. In 1995 he received his doctorate at the Catholic University of Eichstätt with a thesis on German-Latin American relations during the Weimar Republic from a transnational perspective. His advisor was Hans-Joachim König. The work appeared in 1996 as the first volume in the series Historamericana, which was founded by König and Rinke. Since 2021, the series Historamericana has been published by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (Darmstadt) and is available as Open Access Gold and Print on Demand.
From 1996 to 1998, the German Research Foundation (DFG) granted him a postdoctoral fellowship. During this time he spent research periods in Santiago de Chile and Washington D.C., among other places. In September 1998 he was appointed Visiting Assistant Professor for the Comparative History of the Americas and Europe at Tufts University, where he taught until 1999.
In 1999 Stefan Rinke took up a position as assistant professor (Wissenschaftlicher Assistant) in Eichstätt. In 2003, he completed his ‘Habilitation’ with a study on North Americanization and socio-cultural change in Chile. In 2005, he was appointed professor of Latin American history at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2007 to 2009, from 2017 to 2019, and since 2023, Rinke has been Chairman of the Central Institute for Latin American Studies.
Research focus
Stefan Rinke explores the history of Latin America primarily from a transregional and global historical perspective. His research focuses on cultural globalization and North Americanization, popular culture, revolutions, memory and historical consciousness, history of knowledge, trans-American relations, temporality and future. They cover the period from colonial times (Columbus, Conquista of Mexico, Creole identities), the independence period (Atlantic revolutions, thinking about the future), the 19th century (state-building and dictatorships, USA and Latin America), the 20th century (World War I, football, aviation, experts) to contemporary history (memory and conflict in Columbia and Chile, Colonia Dignidad). His territorial focus lies on Chilean and Mexican history, among others.
International activities
Stefan Rinke has been Visiting Professor and Research Fellow at leading international universities, including El Colegio de México and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
From 2009 to 2018, he was spokesperson of the first German-Latin American Research Training Group (IGK 1531 "Between Spaces - Entre Espacios"), a cooperation with Mexican partners dedicated to interdisciplinary research on globalization in history and the present. In the Collaborative Research Center 700 "Governance in Spaces of Limited Statehood" he served as co-spokesperson from 2010 to 2017.
In 2014 he organized the European Congress of Historians of Latin America at Freie Universität and was president of the Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos (AHILA) from 2014 to 2017.
Since 2019, Stefan Rinke has been the spokesperson of the International Research Training Group "Temporalities of Future in Latin America: Dynamics of Aspiration and Anticipation," a German-Mexican cooperation dedicated to researching temporalities of the future in the humanities and social sciences. From 2019 to 2022, he also directed an oral history project on Colonia Dignidad in Chile, funded by the German Foreign Office on behalf of the German Bundestag (CDOH).
In the project Gumelab, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Rinke and his team have been investigating since 2021 the effects of telenovelas and series in Latin America on the political attitudes and historical consciousness of viewers. Since 2023, he is also head of the research project Selbstzeugnisse von Juden nach der Rückkehr aus Lateinamerika nach Berlin (1945/49-1970), which is funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin.