About Franklin Toker...

Franklin Toker is a dedicated nonspecialist and popular teacher and lecturer. A broadly based scholar who was the first non-Italian called to teach the history of art at the University of Florence, Toker has researched the Gothic Revival, the ancient cathedral of Florence (whose excavation he directed over more than a decade), and the architecture and urban history of Pittsburgh.

A past president of the international Society of Architectural Historians, Franklin Toker is a Professor of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches urban history and the history of Medieval and American architecture. Apart from his books, Dr. Toker has published several dozen scholarly articles on topics from Roman archaeology, Gothic architectural drawings, and Renaissance architectural theory, to the work of H.H. Richardson, Post-Modern architecture, and American urban history. In 1971 his first book,

The Church of Notre-Dame in Montréal won the Hitchcock Award as the most distinguished new book on the history of architecture. (Later published in a French edition, it was reissued in a second English edition by McGill-Queen's University Press.) In 1980 the College Art Association awarded Toker's Art Bulletin article on "Florence Cathedral: The Design Stage" the Porter Prize for the best essay on any branch of art. Dr. Toker subsequently held appointments as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of Villa I Tatti in Florence, and a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Born in Montréal in 1944 to a family that has lived for seven generations in French Canada, Franklin Toker obtained degrees in Fine Arts from McGill University, Oberlin College, and Harvard University. His best-known scholarly work was as director of the archaeological excavations below the Duomo, or cathedral of S. Maria del Fiore in Florence, from 1969 to 1974 and in 1980. He is now at work on a four-volume archaeological history of Medieval Florence and its cathedral that will incorporate the results of this work. On his American side, Toker's Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait is now in its third printing. It received an Award of Merit from the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, and is currently published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Outside of his academic work, Prof. Toker is active in civic improvements in Pittsburgh and in architectural and urban preservation. He frequently lectures on architectural and urban topics to national and international audiences, which have included India, China, and Japan.