Portrait of Italy

Robert Gurval is an Emeritus Associate Professor in the UCLA Department of Classics. His area of research and teaching concerns ancient Rome and the legacy of its empire in popular culture and cinema. Gurval’s publications focus on politics, literature and culture in the age of Rome’s first emperor, Caesar Augustus. He earned his B.A. in Classics at Brown University and his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at UCLA since 1990 where he has served as Chair of the Department of Classics and of the faculty committees on the Honors College, General Education Governance, and Undergraduate Honors, Awards and Prizes. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award known as the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching and the American Philological Association’s Excellence in Teaching Award for university professors. He has regularly led the UCLA Summer Travel Study Abroad Program in Rome on its ancient history and monuments. Newly retired, Gurval is intending to spend more time teaching Classics in China and Japan. He received a three-year grant from the UCLA Asia Institute to hold workshops in Hong Kong and Los Angeles on comparative approaches to the study of religion in the ancient worlds from the Near East to China. He has taught seminars on Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, Ancient Biography, and Cleopatra at universities in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing. Since 2005, Gurval has participated as a faculty lecturer on thirteen UCLA Alumni Travel tours.