Joep Schenk (1983) is working as a post-doctoral researcher at Utrecht University. He studied history at the Universities of Groningen and Bologna. In 2007 he finished his Master Holocaust and Genocide studies at the University of Amsterdam with the highest distinction. Between 2007 and 2009 he was appointed researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam and at the Research Institute for History and Culture at Utrecht University. He published several book chapters on the Second World War as a global phenomenon and was the first author of a volume on the history of the Dutch gas industry. Between 2009 and 2015 he worked as a PhD-candidate within the research project ‘Outport and Hinterland. Rotterdam Business and the Ruhr industry 1870-2000’ at Erasmus University Rotterdam. For this project he received an additional grant from the Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst in 2013. In 2012 he was awarded the Runner-up prize for the First Port Research Centre Poster Session. He wrote several papers and one article in the peer-reviewed journal Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte on business networks in the 19th and 20th centuries. More recently he published about the history of Rhine navigation in the peer-reviewed journal The Economic History Review. In November 2015 he succesfully defended his PhD-thesis Port barons and Ruhr tycoons. The origins of an interdependent relationship between Rotterdam and the Ruhr area 1870-1914 on the commercial relations between the port of Rotterdam and the Ruhr industry between 1870 and 1914. In may 2015 he started his post-doctoral research on the role of the Rhine Commission in the makings of a European Security Culture in the long 19th Century.