Western Washington University

04/14/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 04/14/2026 16:05

In Memoriam: Rodney Johns Payton

In Memoriam: Rodney Johns Payton

April 14, 2026

Rodney Johns Payton, Emeritus Professor of the Humanities, passed away on March 22 in Bellingham.

Born in 1940, he received his master's degree in the History of Music from Washington State University and a doctorate in History of Culture from the University of Chicago. In 1970 he started at Western in the newly formed department of General Studies (later renamed Liberal Studies, now Global Humanities and Religions) teaching courses on Western Civilization, and particularly the medieval period.

The following year he was hired onto the tenure track, and in 1975 created his signature course on Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" which he taught for 30 years, and which was taught in the department for another 18 years by other faculty, including Andrea Gogröf and Seán Murphy. He was a member and frequent contributor to conferences of the Dante Society of America.

One colleague described Payton as the main visionary behind the department's cultural history emphasis, and the glue that united the various specializations across global civilizations. He is the author of "A Modern Reader's Guide to Dante's Inferno," published by Peter Lang in 1992, and the translator, along with Ulrich Mammitzsch, of J. Huizinga's "The Autumn of the Middle Ages," published in 1994 with the University of Chicago Press.

His work is also represented in anthologies and professional journals on the subjects of the history of art and music, historiography, and literary criticism. For many years he stewarded the Mammitzsch Fund, a department endowment used to support library acquisitions relating to the Humanities.

As an emeritus, he got involved in the effort to save the WWU Music Library during a time of budget crisis. On a personal note, Prof. Payton was also an expert woodworker and an avid fisherman; he fished salmon commercially in Chuckanut Bay with fellow WWU faculty member Al Froderberg.

Rodney was a founder and pillar of the Humanities at WWU for many decades, and will be missed.

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