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. 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.