By the time he was ready for graduate school, Roberts had begun to lose interest in economics and realized he wanted to study two things: intellectual history and modern Italy. That change led him to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a master’s degree in history in 1966 and his doctorate in 1971, during some of that campus’s most turbulent days as the Vietnam War reached a boiling point.

Roberts’s first position was at the University of Virginia, where he served as an assistant professor of history from 1972-78. He then accepted a position in a genuinely thrilling place for a lover of classical music—the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music, which has its own humanities department. In 1979, his first book, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism was published. He served for six years as department chairman and became a full professor in 1986.

In 1988, UGA, looking to expand its program in modern European history, hired Roberts over a number of other highly qualified candidates, and his long tenure in Athens began. (His wife, Beth Roberts, became even better known in some campus circles, serving for many years as editor of Columns, the university’s faculty-staff newspaper, and leading it to numerous awards.)

Along the way, Roberts co-authored a standard textbook, Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment, just published in its fifth edition. In addition, Roberts is author of seven other books and more than 40 book chapters, articles, and reviews. For years he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in modern European cultural and intellectual history, 20th-century Europe, European fascism, modern Italy, and historiography and the philosophy of history. Reviewers and critics around the globe have lavished praise on his latest book, The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics, and on Roberts himself, a much-respected expert in the field.