In 1937, Auty was appointed an assistant lecturer in German at the University of Cambridge. From 1939 to 1943, he worked for the Czechoslovak Government in Exile and then spent the rest of the Second World War working in the Foreign Office.[2] Though he had already studied the Czech language before the war[3] (and had been impressed by Norman Brooke Jopson's lectures on Old Church Slavonic),[1] his war work left him with an interest in Slavonic studies which overtook his earlier work on German.[3] He returned to the University of Cambridge in 1945 and was appointed to a university lectureship in German, which he held until 1962[5] but the title was changed to include German and Czech in 1948,[2] and to be Lecturer in Slavonic Studies in 1957.[3] In 1950, he was also elected a fellow of Selwyn College.[3] In 1962, Auty moved to the University of London to take up the Professorship of Comparative Philology of the Slavonic Languages. He remained there for three years, before in 1965 he become Professor of Comparative Slavonic Philology at the University of Oxford, which came with a fellowship at Brasenose College.[2] The author of over two dozen articles, his only book was Handbook of Old Church Slavonic, Part II: Texts and Glossary, which was published in 1960.[1]
Auty was an active promoter of Belarusian studies in the UK who also inspired other British academics, such as Arnold McMillin, to engage in this field.[8] In 1965 he became one of the founders of the Journal of Belarusian Studies writing an introduction about "a little-known East European people and its contribution to civilisation".[9][10] In 1971 he opened the Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum, one of the largest Belarusian libraries outside Belarus – an event commemorated by a plaque bearing Auty’s name at the library’s entrance.[11]
