Prof. William Doty (1939-2017) was a professor in the Department of Religious Studies, at the University of Alabama, from 1981 until his retirement in 2001, though he continued teaching courses on campus for many years after that — often, though not always, on the study of myth — for either the Honors College or A&S’s Blount Scholars Program. Yesterday afternoon, a small group of current M.A. students were invited to William’s now mostly empty house, here in Tuscaloosa, where an estate sale had recently taken place, but where a large number of books still remained. “Who knew that the academic books wouldn’t go?” said Doty’s longtime friend and neighbor, Charles Day, with a wink, when he let them into the house to browse the shelves.
It’s fitting that a fairly large number of his books and his detailed notes, written on thick stacks of paper folded into each book, their pages bulging with paperclips and Post-it notes — on everything from postmodernism and New Testament studies to books on myth, material religion, film, literary studies, philosophy, and semiotics — will now populate the shelves of students in the Department; even the faculty will each get a chance to claim a few that, for the time being, reside in boxes in the Chair’s office, as a memento of one of Manly Hall’s former residents.