Jonathan Sperber is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri. His book Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton) won the Herbert Baxter Adams prize of the American Historical Association.

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1992 "Rhineland Radicals displays clearly the same scholarly virtues that made Sperber's first book, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (1984), such an impressive achievement. The research is thorough, the writing uniformly clear and graceful, the analysis powerful and persuasive."--James J. Sheehan, The Times Literary Supplement "A substantial work... One of its strengths lies in the detailed description of economic and social conditions in the pre-1848 period as background to events during the revolution."--American Historical Review