Manuel Castells is Professor of Communication and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles. He holds joint appointments as Professor of Sociology in the USC Sociology Department and Professor of Planning in the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development. He is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute of Humanities.

He is, as well, Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, where he was Professor of City and Regional Planning and Professor of Sociology from 1979 to 2003 before joining USC.

He was born in Spain in 1942 and grew up in Valencia and Barcelona. He studied law and economics at the Universities of Barcelona and Paris. He received a doctorate in sociology and a doctorate in human sciences from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He moved to the United States in 1979.

Between 1967 and 1979 he was assistant professor, then associate professor of sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at the University of Paris. In 1979 he was appointed Professor of City and Regional Planning and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. During his tenure at Berkeley he was chair of the Center for Western European Studies, a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for International Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the College of Environmental Design. In 1988-93, while remaining on the Berkeley faculty, he was Professor and Director of the Institute for Sociology of New Technologies at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He has also been a visiting professor at the Universities of Montreal, Catolica de Chile, FLACSO-Chile, Campinas-Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Metropolitana de Mexico, UNAM-Mexico, Central de Venezuela, Copenhagen, Geneva, Amsterdam, Wisconsin-Madison, Boston, Southern California, Hitotsubashi (Tokyo) and Oxford, and he is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has lectured in over 300 academic institutions in 45 countries.

He is the author of 19 academic books and editor or co-author of 21 additional books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. His trilogy "The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture" was published by Blackwell in 1996-98 in the first edition and in 2000-2003 in its second edition. It has been reprinted in English 17 times, and translated into Spanish (Spain and Mexico), French, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Chinese (in complex characters in Taipei, in simplified characters in Beijing), Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, Korean, Parsi, Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Danish, Lithuanian, Turkish, Hungarian, and Catalan, and is in the process of translation in Japanese, Polish, Ukranian, Indonesian, and Arabic. His most recent books are "The Internet Galaxy" (Oxford University Press, 2001), which has now been translated in 16 languages; "The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model" (Oxford University Press, 2002, with Pekka Himanen), translated in 7 languages; "La societat xarxa a Catalunya" (Mondadori, 2003, co-author); "The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004, editor and co-author); "Globalizacion, Desarrollo y Democracia: Chile en el Contexto Mundial" (Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2005); “The Network Society: from Knowledge to Policy” (Washington D.C.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) (co-editor); and “Mobile Communication and Society” (Cambridge: The M.I.T Press, 2006) (co-authored with M.Fernandez-Ardevol, J.L. Qiu, and A.Sey).

Among other distinctions, he has received the Guggenheim Fellowship; the C. Wright Mills Award from the American Society for the Study of Social Problems; the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association for his lifelong contribution to community and urban sociology; the Kevin Lynch Award of Urban Design from M.I.T; the Medal of Urbanism from the City of Madrid; the Eric Schelling Prize of Architectural Theory from the Eric Schelling Foundation, Germany; the National Medal of Science from Catalonia; the Ithiel de Sola Pool Award from the American Political Science Association; the Godo Prize of Journalism, from the Foundation Count of Godo, Spain; the Life Long Research Award from the Committee on Computers and Information Technology of the American Sociological Association.

He has received, as well, honorary doctorates from the Universities of Valencia, Queen's (Canada), Castilla-La Mancha, Twente (Netherlands), San Andres (La Paz), Sao Paulo (Medal of Honor), Higher School of Economics (Moscow), Helsinki University of Technology, University of Leuven (Belgium), City University of London, Universidad de Leon (Spain), East China Normal University (Shanghai), New School University (New York), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne), and Universite du Quebec a Montreal, jointly with Tele-Universite du Quebec.

He is a Fellow of the European Academy, a Fellow of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics and Finance, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).

He has served, or is serving, on the boards or advisory boards of 21 academic journals. He is currently the co-editor (with Larry Gross) of the International Journal of Communication.

He has served, or is serving, on the following boards and advisory councils:

High Level Expert Group on the Information Society of the European Commission; Advisory Council on Science and Technology, Government of Spain; Advisory Board of the Research Institute of the International Labor Office (ILO), United Nations; International Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation on the Problems of Socio-Political Transition (1992); Advisory Council of the United Nations Task Force on Information and Communication Technology; Advisory Board of the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program; United Nations Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Global Civil Society and the United Nations; Advisory Council to the United Nations Secretary General on Information and Communication Technology and Global Development; Advisory Board of the International Association of Science Parks; Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University; International Advisory Council on Information Technology and Development of the President of South Africa (current); Advisory Council on the Information Society, Government of Spain (current); Asian Media Information and Communication Center (current); Scientific Council of the European Research Council, the European Union’s research funding agency (current); Board of the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles (current).

He has been a pro-bono advisor to the governments of Chile (Allende administration and Lagos administration), Portugal, Spain, Mexico, Ecuador, Nicaragua (Sandinista administration), China, Brazil (Cardoso administration), Russia (Yeltsin administration), Finland, and South Africa, as well as a consultant with US AID, the European Commission, the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, International Labor Office, and UNESCO.

He has been knighted for cause of scientific merit by the Governments of France (Order of Arts and Letters), Finland (Order of the Lion of Finland), Chile (Order of Gabriela Mistral), and Portugal (Order of Santiago da Espada).