William Stott

William Stott—“Bill” to you and everyone who knows him--was born in New York City in June 1940 as France was falling to the Nazis. World War II has always been near the center of his emotional life and partly explains his having worked for the U.S. State Department doing propaganda (then called "cultural relations," now "public diplomacy") during the Cold War 1960s; his posts were Dakar, Senegal, and Fez and Rabat, Morocco.

He found that what he liked best about the work was being a teacher and returned to the States, got a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale, and taught for thirty years at the University of Texas at Austin. Along the way he was a Fulbright lecturer in London (1980-81) and Leiden (1986-87); gave talks—generally under U.S. government sponsorship—in more than a dozen countries; published five books (two in collaboration with his friend John Lee); and wrote several others he still hopes to do something with.

He has a daughter, son-in-law, two grandsons, two step-grandchildren, an ex-wife, a house (which he shares with indie filmmaker Bob Byington), and many friends in Austin; and a son and daughter-in-law (both architects) and another grandson in Los Angeles. He lives much of the time in Santiago, Chile, with his wife Irene Rostagno and her daughter.

Bill’s other books include Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973, 1984); On Broadway: Performance Photographs by Fred Fehl (1978), with Jane Stott; and, in collaboration with John Lee, Recovery: Plain and Simple (1990) and Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately (1993). In addition, though the book scarcely mentions him, Bill collaborated with his wife Jane in translating and revising an unpublished wartime memoir their friend Claire Chevrillon had written for her family; the result is Claire Chevrillon and Jane Kielty Stott, Code Name Christiane Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance (1995); later, Claire published her revision of the memoir, Une résistance ordinaire: septembre 1939 - août 1944 (1999).

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