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August 13, 2012

Manuel Castells Named Kluge Chair in Technology and Society

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed sociologist Manuel Castells as the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center.

Castells will use the Library’s collections to conduct research on the currency crisis in Europe for a forthcoming book. His most recent book, to be published in September, examines networked social movements during the age of the Internet.

An expert on the information age and its sociological implications, Castells is a University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California. He is professor emeritus of sociology and professor emeritus of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for 24 years.

Since 2009, he has been a permanent visiting fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa. He is also a research professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. He has authored 26 books, including the trilogy "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 1996-2003," which was translated into 23 languages, and "Communication Power," which presents a global and interdisciplinary perspective on the social and political effects of the communications revolution.

In March 2012, Castells was awarded the prestigious Holberg International Memorial Prize from the Parliament of Norway, the citation for which read: "Manuel Castells is the leading sociologist of the city and new information and media technologies. His ideas and writings have shaped our understanding of the political dynamics of urban and global economies in the network society. He has illuminated the underlying power structures of the great technological revolutions of our time and their consequences. He has helped us to understand how social and political movements have co-evolved with the new information technologies."

Castells has received many additional awards and distinctions, including the Guggenheim Fellowship; the C. Wright Mills Award from the American Society for the Study of Social Problems; and the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association. Castells has served as a member of the Library’s Scholars Council since 2010.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another, to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holds more than 151.8 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning website atwww.loc.gov.

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PR 12-150
08/13/12
ISSN 0731-3527

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