White, Richard

Richard White is an independent historian and author and part-time instructor in Canadian history at UTM. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1995, at which time his main field of expertise was the social and cultural history of civil engineering. He published two monographs in the field, Gentlemen Engineers: The Civil Engineering Careers of Frank and Walter Shanly (UT Press, 1999) and The Skule Story: The University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, 1873-2000 (FASE in association with UT Press, 2001), as well as scholarly articles on engineering professionalism and education. In 2003 he began an association with the Toronto-based Neptis Foundation, a private foundation devoted to research in urban affairs, serving for a time as its Research Director as well as conducting his own research on the history of Toronto urban planning. The latter led to the publication of two major historical papers (see www.neptis.org), and began a research program that continues to this day. Having given numerous conference papers and public lectures, and having recently completed his book on the history of Toronto planning since the Second World War, publication of which is in process, Richard White is now the leading authority on the history of Toronto urban and regional planning. His work on Jane Jacobs and her role in Toronto planning history has received international attention, with one article published in the US-based Journal of Planning History, and another forthcoming in a German publication on Jane Jacobs’s international impact.

Professor White has a wide range of interests in Canadian history, and teaches various courses at both the introductory and advanced level.