Jonathan Sperber is a professor of Modern European History at the University of Missouri and author of – among others – "Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life" and "Europe 1850-1914: Progress, Participation and Apprehension". His scholarship is best described as social history, although there is plenty of political and religious history in it as well.  Much of the writing deals with nineteenth century Europe, and primarily Germany, although he has made occasional forays into the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and to other parts of the continent.  One important focus of his work has been the history of religion as well as the history of popular politics