Santiago Muñoz Machado (Pozoblanco, Spain – 1949) is the Director of the Real Academia Española (RAE) and President of the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. Since 1994, he has been Professor of Administrative Law at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and he is full member of the Real Academia Española and of the Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas. He has published more than fifty books and multiple academic articles on law, including his outstanding Tratado de derecho administrativo y derecho público general (2005). He is also the author of a number of essays and works on historical research as Informe sobre España. Repensar el Estado o destruirlo (2012, awarded with the Spanish National Essay Prize in 2013), Cataluña y las demás Españas (2014), and Vieja y nueva Constitución (2016). He is Doctor Honoris Causa by the universities of Cordoba, Extremadura and Valencia. His latest published book is titled El Poder y la Peste (2022).