Robert Gordon University events. The mace is a modern design in silver and black, designed and crafted in 1993 by Gordon Burnett (a member of staff at the university's Gray's School of Art), and paid for by the City of Aberdeen as a gift to the new university. It was presented to the university at a ceremony on 26 June that year during which the first chancellor of the university, Bob Reid, was installed. The mace is primarily jet-black, with wavy fins edged in silver that run vertically down the full length of the mace's head (reflecting the wavy black band in the
Robert Gordon (academic) Robert Gordon (academic) Robert Samuel Clive Gordon, FBA (born 13 March 1966) is a scholar of Italian studies and an academic. Since 2012, he has been Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Cambridge. Born on 13 March 1966, Robert Samuel Clive Gordon completed his undergraduate studies at Pembroke College, Oxford. He joined St John's College, Cambridge, to complete a doctorate; his PhD was awarded in 1993 for his thesis "Pier Paolo Pasolini and the work of subjectivity". He was elected a lecturer and fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1990, and left in 1998 to become a lecturer