Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics & German Studies, and Professor of Sociology (by courtesy)
About
Andrei Markovits is currently the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author and editor of many books, scholarly articles, conference papers, book reviews and newspaper contributions in English and many foreign languages on topics as varied as German and Austrian politics, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, social democracy, social movements, the European right and the European left. Markovits has also worked extensively on comparative sports culture in Europe and North America. His latest book on that subject is entitled Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture and has just been published by Princeton University Press. The book analyzes how professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice.
Currently, Markovits’s academic work comprises three areas of research: First and foremost, he has published a book on anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Europe. Entitled “Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America” and published by Princeton University Press, this work analyzes resentment towards things American in seven European countries. Going well beyond the conventional realm of politics, Markovits demonstrates that such resentment pervades quotidian culture and discourse.
Second, Markovits continues his work on sports. In particular, he has expanded his analyses of how gender construes hegemonic sports culture from his earlier work at the University of Michigan to comprise other institutions of the Big Ten Conference.
Third, Markovits has just embarked on an analysis as to how the discourse towards animals, dogs in particular, has massively changed in the advanced industrial world over the past 20 – 30 years. In particular, he hopes to ascertain why key aspects of this changed discourse and its accompanying behavior have featured women as their most dynamic and central agents. Centering his work on a major survey of canine rescue organizations in Michigan, Markovits hopes to expand this project to Massachusetts (the Union’s most Democratic state) and Utah (its most Republican) in order to see how politics conventionally understood might – or might not – play a role in the altered nature of how humans relate to animals, specifically dogs. Once the research in the United States will be completed, Markovits has plans to place the American case into a comparative framework by analyzing parallel developments in Great Britain and Germany.