Werner Senn was Professor of Modern English Literature until his retirement in June 2007. He held that position since 1984 and taught not only modern English but also postcolonial literatures, especially Australian literature. He has published books on Elizabethan drama and on Joseph Conrad as well as articles on a wide range of topics and authors in English, American and Australian literature, among them Robert Greene, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Patrick White, on Australian poets such as Rosemary Dobson, Les Murray, and Philip Hodgins, on labyrinths in narrative texts, on the relation of visual and verbal art, poems on paintings, the Alps in English writing and the representation of Britain’s commercial expansion in English poetry. He has edited or co-edited several collections of essays on English and on Australian literature and culture, among them The Making of a Pluralist Australia, 1950-1990 (Berne: Peter Lang, 1992), and Families (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1996). His recent publications deal with the concept of paradise in John Milton's Paradise Lost and with ritual in Shakespeare. He is currently working on the topic of island fiction in English.
