Francisco Prado Vilar is a Distinguished Researcher at the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he is a member of the SÍNCRISIS Group for Research in Cultural Forms (GI-1919). e holds a PhD from Harvard University, and held research and teaching positions at Princeton, BBK-London, Stanford, and Complutense Universities. He was Director of Projects at Harvard's Royal Complutense College, where he is now a Fellow. He was coordinator of the Scientific Committee of the Proxecto de Restauración del Pórtico de la Gloria de la Catedral de Santiago, and member of the European Heritage Label Committee.

His lines of research are characterised by their chronological, thematic and methodological diversity and their high degree of impact on various branches of the humanities, among which the study and conservation of heritage stand out, through the exploration of new horizons of knowledge.

He participates as principal investigator in the “Mellon Program of Research and Conservation of the Portal of Glory” by the Mellon Foundation and the General Foundation of the Complutense University of Madrid; and previously in the project “Arte y cultura europea: Trasfondo clásico e impacto en los discursos de la modernidad” (HA2010-20357), which was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation.

His most recent bibliographical contributions include:

• F. Prado-Vilar, “The Marble Tempest: Material Imagination, the Echoes of Nostos, and the Transfiguration of Myth in Romanesque Sculpture”, en Icons of Sound: Voice, Architecture and Imagination in Medieval Art, ed. Bissera V. Pentcheva (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 152-205. ISBN 9780367440879.
• F. Prado-Vilar “The Superstes: Resurrection, the Survival of Antiquity, and the Poetics of the Body in Romanesque Sculpture”, en Transformatio et Continuatio – Forms of Change and Constancy of Antiquity in the Iberian Peninsula 500-1500, ed. H. Bredekamp e S. Trinks (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), pp. 137- 88. ISBN: 9783110471991.
• F. Prado-Vilar, “The Awakening of Endymion: Beauty, Time, and Eternity in Romanesque Sculpture and Its Photographic Afterlife”, Codex Aquilarensis 35, Special issue: Beauty, Persuasion and Rhetoric in Medieval Art (2019), pp. 223-51. ISBN: ISSN 0214-896X.

As well as the edition of the books:

• El Pórtico de la Gloria: Arquitectura, materia y visión /The Portal of Glory: Architecture, Matter, and Vision (Madrid: Editorial Fundación Complutense, 2020) ISBN: 978-84-123063-0-9.
• El Pórtico de la Gloria: Restauración, policromía y la transfiguración de la materia (Madrid: Editorial Fundación Complutense, 2022) ISBN 978-84-123063-1-6.