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

University of Wisconsin–Madison The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...

. Senn was born in

Madison, Wisconsin Madison is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. It is the List of municipalities in Wisconsin by population, second-most populous city in the state, with a population of 269,840 at the 2020 Uni ...

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

University of Lithuania Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) (, VDU) is a public university in Kaunas, Lithuania. The university was founded in 1922 during the Polish–Lithuanian War, interwar period as an alternate national university. Initially it was known as the Univ ...

, 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 (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

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

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

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. 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. * '' icholas Rubakin: A Life for Books 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