Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells is a leading scholar on globalization, network society, and internet studies. At the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, he is University Professor; Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society; and Professor of Communication, Sociology, Planning, and International Relations. In addition to his appointments at USC Annenberg, Manuel Castells holds joint appointments in the Department of Sociology, in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development, and in the School of International Relations.

Castells is also a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor of city and regional planning and a professor of sociology from 1979 to 2003 before joining USC. From 1988–1993, he was professor and director of the Institute for Sociology of New Technologies at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. From 2001–2012, he was director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona.

He was director of research at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge in 2011­–18, and is a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. He was also a distinguished visiting professor of technology and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2004–2009; a distinguished visiting professor of internet studies at Oxford University from 2006–2010; and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the U.S. Library of Congress. He is currently a distinguished visiting professor of communication at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has also been a visiting professor at the Universities of Montreal, Catolica de Chile, Brasilia, UNAM-Mexico, Geneva, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Wisconsin-Madison, Boston, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Hitotsubashi (Tokyo) He has lectured in more than 300 academic institutions in 46 countries.