Former CASBS fellow Andrei S. Markovits is the 2015 winner of the University of Michigan Press Book Award. Markovits worked on From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion (coauthored with Kate Crosby) during his 2008-09 fellowship year at the Center. The book examines the transformation of dogs’ status in the US over the last 50 years from that of human companion to something more like a human family member. In doing so, Markovits also traces related phenomena such as the remarkable rise of canine rescue organizations and the changing nature of compassion in American emotional discourse. The University of Michigan Press Book Award is given to the best work published by the press in the prior two calendar years that was also written by a member of the UM faculty.
Markovits is currently Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2012 he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, that country’s highest civilian honor, in recognition of his academic achievement.