Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells is a sociologist widely known for his research on the information society, communication and globalization.

He is currently Director of Research in the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, and Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley.  He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor at MIT and at Oxford University.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics, of the Academia Aeuropea, of the Mexican Academy, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. 

He has published 26 books, including the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Blackwell, 1996-2004), translated into 21 languages, and Communication Power (Oxford University Press, 2009). Among his distinctions, he has received the 2010 Erasmus Medal of Science from Academia Europaea, the 2012 Holberg Memorial Prize from the Parliament of Norway and the 2013 Balzan Prize in the Social Sciences from the International Balzan Prize Foundation. He was a founding board member of the European Research Council (ERC) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) of the European Commission.