Andrei Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan. Markovits was born in October 1948 in the west Romanian town of Timisoara. Raised in Vienna, Austria and New York, Markovits has led a bi-continental existence throughout his life. After receiving his doctorate in political science in 1976 at Columbia University, Markovits went to the Center for European Studies at Harvard University of which he would remain an active member and a Research Associate until June 30, 1999. Between 1977 and 1983, Markovits was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Thereafter, he joined the faculty at Boston University where he was Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science from 1983 until 1992. He then became Professor in and Chair of the Department of Politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he remained until joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1999.

A specialist on the politics of Western and Central Europe -- Germany and Austria in particular -- Markovits has published sixteen books and edited volumes; well over 100 scholarly articles; more than 50 review essays; and many articles and interviews in the American and European press. His most recent publication is entitled Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes the United States. This book analyzes the history and structure of anti-Americanism in Western Europe and argues that -- though massively exacerbated by the Bush Administration's irresponsible, even criminal, policies -- this resentment has had a life all its own well before the appearance of George W. Bush and will endure well past his presidency. This book was published by Princeton University Press in 2007 and has garnered much attention in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia. The book's German predecessor, published in 2004, is in its 3rd edition and received much praise in reviews appearing in leading periodicals in the German-speaking world.

Markovits has been invited to deliver more than 400 lectures at academic conferences, universities and other scholarly settings in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel. His publications have appeared in English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Chinese, Farsi and Hebrew. Markovits has held academic appointments at Dortmund University, Osnabrueck University and Bochum University in Germany; Innsbruck University in Austria where he was a Fulbright Professor in the Department of Political Science; St. Gallen University in Switzerland; and The Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University in Israel. Markovits's topics of interest and areas of publication include: German and European labor; German and European social democracy, as well as social movements; German-Jewish relations; Germany's role in the new Europe; Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism in Europe; and -- most recently -- the comparative sociology of modern sports cultures. Markovits has won a number of teaching awards at the institutions with which he was affiliated during his academic career, most recently the Golden Apple with which the student body of the University of Michigan declared him its best professor in 2007.

Jeff Weintraub is a social and political theorist with overlapping interests in comparative politics, political sociology, political economy, and culture. He received his Ph.D. from Berkeley (1979) and since then has taught at Harvard University, the University of California in San Diego, Williams College, and Bryn Mawr/Haverford, and now the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (in Florence, Italy) and a Visiting Research Scholar at Lehigh University.

His work includes a co-edited collection on Public and Private in Thought and Practice, which opens with his essay on "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction," as well as "Democracy and the Market: A Marriage of Inconvenience" and a forthcoming book, Freedom and Community: The Republican Virtue Tradition and the Sociology of Liberty, that seeks to combine a reinterpretation of the social-philosophical roots of modern social theory, an inquiry into the bases of social and political order, and a reassessment of the nature and conditions of democratic citizen­ship. Other long-term preoccupations include the conditions of freedom and community in modern society; the relationship between war, society, and politics in comparative and historical perspective; and the interplay between various forms of nationalism and ethnic conflict in the modern era.

Weintraub also has a weblog, "Jeff Weintraub - Commentaries and Controversies" (http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/), in which he addresses current issues in politics and public policy, among others. For example, since 2004 Weintraub has closely followed the unfolding catastrophe in Darfur and the world's failure to respond to it effectively (some of his writings on the subject can be found at: http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/1990/01/darfur.html).

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