Andrei S. Markovits is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan. 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. In August 2021, Markovits published a memoir entitled The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness.

Andy Markovits was born in October 1948 in the west Romanian city of Timișoara. He was raised as the single child of a middle-class Jewish family, speaking German and Hungarian at home. In school he learned Romanian, and from his early childhood he was tutored in English—later in French as well. Thus, his multilingual identity dates back to his childhood as well as the polyglot part of the world where he grew up. At the age of nine, he and his father emigrated from Romania, first to Vienna and then to New York, the two cities that would play the most important roles in his upbringing. Between 1959 and 1967, he spent the school year—September through June—in Vienna; and the summer months in New York.

After being graduated from Vienna's prestigious Theresianische Akademie with a Matura degree (the Austrian equivalent of the German Abitur), Markovits enrolled at Columbia University in New York City where he completed all of his post-secondary education, acquiring five degrees in the process. He studied political science, economics, sociology, and business administration. After receiving his doctorate in political science in 1976, he 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.

At the Harvard Center, Markovits chaired for many years the study group on German Politics as well as one entitled "The Jews in Modern Europe." He founded the quarterly journal German Politics and Society in 1983 which in the meantime has become the foremost scholarly journal on modern German politics in the United States. He participated in many of the center's activities and became one of that institution's mainstays over the years. In turn, the center's uniquely rich intellectual atmosphere and immensely creative interdisciplinarity have had a major hand in forming Markovits's scholarly life.

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 the Department of Politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz which he chaired until 1995 and where he remained until joining the faculty at the University of Michigan on September 1, 1999. Markovits has been awarded many fellowships, scholarships and research grants. During the academic year of 2002/2003, Markovits was visiting professor of social studies at Harvard University.

He has held academic appointments at a number of universities overseas. Among them have been Dortmund University, Osnabrück 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. He spent the academic year 1998/99 as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin—Institute for Advanced Study Berlin.

In June 2008, Markovits served as the Dr. Elizabeth Ortner-Chopin Visiting Professor at Webster University in Vienna, Austria.

Andy Markovits was a Fellow in 2008–2009 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.