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.
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.
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).
[8] 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.
He has also successfully nominated the historians Hilda Sabato (2011), Irina Podgorny (2013), Raanan Rein (2016), Max Paul Friedman (2018), Ricardo Pérez Montfort (2020), Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (2021) and Diego Armus (2023) for Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Awards.
His students hold professorships in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Denmark, Colombia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru and Switzerland.
[10] Rinke is a member of the advisory board of the German Historical Institute Washington D.C. and Berkeley, the Centro Maria Sibylla Merian de Estudios Avanzados (CALAS) in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the Einstein Foundation Berlin.
In 2017 he was awarded the Premio Alzate of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Mexico) for his complete works.