Professor Carlos Illades Aguiar holds a BA and MA in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and a Ph.D. from El Colegio de México. He is a professor in the Department of Humanities of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Cuajimalpa Campus, national researcher Level III of the SNI, member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, full member of the Mexican Academy of History and distinguished professor of the UAM.

He has been a visiting researcher at the universities of Harvard, Jaume I, Potsdam, Leiden, Columbia, and the CIDE. He has taught graduate courses at UAM, Instituto Mora, BUAP, UNAM, El Colegio de México and Jaume I University. Research Award of the Mexican Academy of Sciences (1999), he has participated as a speaker in eighty congresses in Mexico and abroad and has published scientific articles in Mexico, Spain, Germany, Holland, France, England, Australia, Russia, United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.

He has directed forty-three undergraduate and graduate theses, and published sixteen books as sole author, including "Presencia española en la Revolución mexicana, 1910-1915" (1991, Marcos y Celia Maus Award, UNAM), "Hacia la república del trabajo: El mutualismo artesanal del siglo XIX" (1996, second revised and expanded edition in 2016), "Rhodakanaty y la formación del pensamiento socialista en México" (2002, Edmundo O'Gorman Award, INAH), "Las otras ideas. Estudio sobre el primer socialismo en México", 1850-1935 (2008, Gastón García Cantú Award, INEHRM), "La inteligencia rebelde. La izquierda en el debate público en México, 1968-1989" (2012, Research Award, UAM), "De La Social a Morena. Breve historia de la izquierda en México" (2014), "Conflict, domination and violence. Chapters of social history" (2015, translated into English in 2017), "The future is ours. History of the Left in Mexico" (2018), "Marxism in Mexico. Una historia intelectual" (2018), "En los márgenes. Rhodakanaty en Mexico" (2019) and "Back to the Left. "The Fourth Transformation in Mexico: from oligarchic despotism to the tyranny of the majority" (2020).

Editor of the works of Plotino C. Rhodakanaty (1998, 2001 and in press), of Victor Considerant's letters to Marshal Bazaine (2008), as well as of Comrades. New history of communism in Mexico (2017). Coeditor of Obras, by Nicolás Pizarro (2005), México como problema. Esbozo de una historia intelectual (2012), Mundos posibles. El primer socialismo en Europa y América Latina (2014) and Primeros escritos, de Juan Nepomuceno Adorno (2015). He is part of the editorial board of academic journals in Mexico, Chile, Spain and Russia.

He was head of the Philosophy Department of the Iztapalapa Campus of the UAM (1998-2002) and founding director of the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Cuajimalpa Campus (2005-2009). He has been a member of review commissions and evaluation committees at CONACYT, CIESAS, INAH, Instituto Mora, Academia Mexicana de Ciencias, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of UNAM, UIA, CIDE and UAM.