Rate My Professor Frank Salmon

Professor Frank Salmon MA (Cantab. and London), PhD, LittD, FSA, is Professor of the History of Classical Architecture in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge, within the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art. Educated at Downing College, Cambridge, and the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, he lectured at the University of Manchester from 1989 to 2002. He then served as Assistant Director for Academic Activities at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London and as Adjunct Associate Professor of the History of Art at Yale University before returning to Cambridge in 2006. At Cambridge, he was Head of the Department of History of Art from 2009 to 2012, became a Fellow of St John's College, and served as its President from 2015 to 2019. Since 2021, he has directed the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture and has supervised over 20 PhD students.

Salmon specialises in the history of classical architecture from the ancient Graeco-Roman world to the present day, focusing on neo-classical and Italianate architecture in Britain and Europe from 1700 to 1900, Greek archaeology and antiquarianism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the public architecture of William Kent, British nobles as architects in the Hanoverian period, Stockholm's architecture from 1810 to 1860, and Victorian architecture inspired by the Italian Renaissance. His key publications include Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture (Ashgate, 2000), which won the 2001 Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society (jointly) and the 2002 Spiro Kostof Prize of the American Society of Architectural Historians; Summerson and Hitchcock: Centenary Essays on Architectural Historiography (edited, Yale University Press, 2006); William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain (Yale University Press, 2013); The Persistence of the Classical (edited, 2009); Royalty and Architecture: Visions and Ambitions of European Monarchs and Nobility (co-edited, Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2024); and Stockholms arkitektur: från barock till postmodernism (co-edited, 2025). He served on the Historic England Advisory Committee from 2012 to 2018, has been a Trustee of Sir John Soane's Museum since 2020, and featured on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time in 2025 discussing Sir John Soane. He will serve as Director of Postgraduate Education in 2025-26 and editor of The Georgian Group Journal from 2026.