Sean Brenner | May 12, 2025
Robert Gurval retired from active teaching in 2019, intending to teach in China and travel more.
When the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into those plans, Gurval focused his attention closer to home: He immersed himself in learning and teaching about the history and architecture of UCLA, offering walking tours and leading a Fiat Lux seminar on the subjects.
Now, Gurval, a professor emeritus of classics, has been honored by UCLA with the 2025 Carole E. Goldberg Emeriti Service Award and a $1,000 prize.
In an email announcing the honor, Michael Levine, vice chancellor for academic affairs and personnel and the chair of the award selection committee, lauded Gurval’s efforts to illuminate the campus’s origins and evolution for students, alumni and others.
“Through various mechanisms — Fiat Lux courses, lectures, campus tours for the Division of Humanities Dean’s Circle, the Chancellor’s Society, and during UCLA’s Centennial Celebration, and a feature article, ‘Stories in Stone,’ for the UCLA College of Letters and Science Magazine — Professor Gurval has brought the history of UCLA to life and introduced many to a fascinating and important story,” Levine wrote.
Gurval will teach the Fiat Lux seminar again in the fall; he said he hopes to continue leading that course and giving tours well into the future.
“I feel incredibly fortunate to have made my academic career at UCLA,” he said. “Like most faculty, I never felt that retirement was an end to my association with UCLA. Instead, it simply gave me more time to do what I love most — researching and teaching the history and architecture of the university and, above all, leading walking tours of the Westwood campus.”
He has also remained connected to the Bruin community through UCLA Alumni Travel programs. In late April and early May, he gave two lectures (“Cleopatra in Morocco” and “Julius Caesar and the Dancing Girls of Cadiz”) during a four-nation cruise from Casablanca to Lisbon.
Gurval joined UCLA in 1988 as a lecturer before earning a tenure-track faculty position in 1989; he served as the chair of the classics department twice, 2000–05 and 2013–14. Among his previous campus honors are the Eugen Weber Honors Collegium Faculty Award, in 2019, and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, in 2006.
A scholar of Latin literature, ancient biography, Roman numismatics and the reception of classics in American popular culture, he wrote “Actium and Augustus: The Politics and Emotions of Civil War,” which was published in 1996 by the University of Michigan Press.
Gurval is the first Humanities Division faculty member to win the Goldberg award, which was established in 2015 to honor emeriti for service to the academic enterprise after their retirement. The honor is named for Carole E. Goldberg, UCLA’s Jonathan D. Varat Distinguished Professor of Law Emerita.
Source: Classics professor Robert Gurval receives emeriti service award – UCLA Humanities