Matthijs Lok studied European history at the Universities of Liverpool, Leiden, and Yale, followed by a brief career as a policy advisor. In 2009 he took his PhD at the History Department of the University of Amsterdam. In 2011 Lok received tenure as an universitair docent and in 2015 he became senior university lecturer. Lok was appointed a senior fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study NIAS (2019-20) and held visiting positions at the Lichtenberg Kolleg & Moritz Stern Institut Göttingen, Germany (2021-22) and the KU Leuven, Belgium (2022).