Professor Catherine Schenk FRHistS, FAcSS, FRSA has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Royal Holloway, University of London and University of Glasgow.  She has also been visiting professor at Nankai University, China, and Hong Kong University and has been visiting researcher at the International Monetary Fund and the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research. She is Associate Fellow in international economics at Chatham House, London and is on the Academic Council of the European Association of Banking and Financial History.

Professor Schenk teaches students in the MSc/MPhil Economic and Social History.

My research focuses on the development of the international economy since 1945 with particular emphasis on the evolution of international banking and finance and the international monetary system.  My current funded project is Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations (UPIER) funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area.  This project has partners in Sweden, Switzerland and Spain and focuses on how the past was interpreted and used by policy-makers and market actors during and after financial crises.  I’m particularly interested in the accumulation and restructuring of sovereign debt in the 1970s and 1980s.  My other research focuses on the transitions between international currencies and proposals for reform of the international monetary system in the 1970s and 1980s and the development of international banking and financial regulation.  Finally, I have a special interest in the history of China’s international economic relations through Hong Kong.

Books:

C.R. Schenk, Y. Cassis and R. Grossman, eds., Oxford Handbook of Banking and Financial History, Oxford, 2016.

C.R. Schenk, International Economic Relations since 1945, Routledge, 2011.

C.R. Schenk, The Decline of Sterling; managing the retreat of an international currency 1945-1992, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

C.R. Schenk, ed., Hong Kong SAR’s Monetary and Exchange Rate Challenges; historical perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

C.R. Schenk, Hong Kong as an International Financial Centre: emergence and development 1945-65, London: Routledge, 2001.    

C.R. Schenk, Britain and the Sterling Area: From Devaluation to Convertibility, London: Routledge, 1994.

Recent Journal Articles:

C.R. Schenk, ‘Rogue trading at Lloyds Bank International, 1974: operational risk in volatile markets’, Business History Review, 2017, 91(1), pp. 105-128.

C.R. Schenk, ‘Negotiating Positive Non-Interventionism: Regulating Hong Kong’s Finance Companies 1976-86’, China Quarterly, 230, 2017, pp. 348-370

R.N. McCauley C.R. Schenk, ‘Reforming the International Monetary System in the 1970s and 2000s: would an SDR substitution account have worked?’, International Finance, 18(2), 2015, pp. 187-206.

C.R. Schenk and J. Singleton, ‘The shift from sterling to the dollar 1965-76: evidence from Australia and New Zealand’, Economic History Review, 68(4), 2015, pp. 1154-1176.

C.R. Schenk, ‘Summer in the City: banking scandals of 1974 and the development of international banking supervision’, English Historical Review, 2014, pp. 1129-1156.

C.R. Schenk, ‘The Sterling Area and Economic Disintegration’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 39 (2), 2013, pp. 177-96.

C.R. Schenk, ‘The dissolution of a monetary union: the case of Malaysia and Singapore 1963-1974’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2013.