Alfred Erich Senn (April 12, 1932 – March 8, 2016) was a professor of history at the

University of Wisconsin–Madison A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United Stat ...

. Senn was born in

Madison, Wisconsin Madison is the county seat of Dane County and the capital city of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 census the population was 269,840, making it the second-largest city in Wisconsin by population, after Milwaukee, and the 80th ...

, to Swiss philologist and lexicographer, . His father taught at the

University of Lithuania Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) ( lt, Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas (VDU)) is a public university in Kaunas, Lithuania. The university was founded in 1922 during the interwar period as an alternate national university. Initially it was kn ...

, where he met his future wife. After they married, they moved to the United States in 1930 or 1931, along with two daughters. Senn received a BA in 1953 from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...

and then an MA in 1955 and a PhD in 1958 from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in East European history. He started teaching at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961, and he retired as professor emeritus. Senn was the author of various books and numerous scholarly articles. Many of his works center on the

history of Lithuania The history of Lithuania dates back to settlements founded many thousands of years ago, but the first written record of the name for the country dates back to 1009 AD. Lithuanians, one of the Baltic peoples, later conquered neighboring lands an ...

. His book ''Gorbachev's Failure in Lithuania'' was awarded the Edgar Anderson Presidential Prize by the American Association of Baltic Studies in 1996. He died at his home in Madison on March 8, 2016.

Works

* ''Lithuania 1940: Revolution from Above''. Amsterdam: Ropodi, 2007. * ''Power, Politics, and the Olympic Games''. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1999. * ''Gorbachev's Failure in Lithuania''. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. * ''Lithuania Awakening''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. * ''Assassination in Switzerland: The Murder of Vatslav Vorovsky''. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. * ''Jonas Basanavičius, the Patriarch of the Lithuanian National Renaissance''. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1980. * ''Nicholas Rubakin: A Life for Books''. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977. * ''Diplomacy and Revolution: the Soviet Mission to Switzerland, 1918''. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974. * ''The Russian Revolution in Switzerland, 1914–1917''. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. * ''The Great Powers, Lithuania and the Vilna Question 1920–1928''. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1966. * ''The Emergence of Modern Lithuania''. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959.

References

Balticists 1932 births 2016 deaths Writers from Madison, Wisconsin 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers Historians of Lithuania University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty American people of Swiss descent American people of Lithuanian descent Historians from Wisconsin 20th-century American male writers {{US-historian-stub