Alma Wittlin

Alma Stephanie Wittlin, Alma S. Wittlin, (March 23, 1899 Lemberg – December 31, 1991 Palo Alto) was an Austrian writer art historian, writer, educational theorist, émigré to Britain and the United States, and a museologist and heritologist. Her surname also appears as Wittlin-Frischauer.

Life Born in or near Lviv, Austro-Hungarian Empire, she was educated in Vienna, receiving a doctorate in art history from the University of Vienna in 1925, and came to England in 1937. She carried out educational research at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. In 1952, she came to the United States and was naturalized in 1959.

In 1921, she married Paul Max Frischauer.

While in Austria, she wrote a number of successful historical novels.

In 1952 Wittlin emigrated to the United States, where she received permanent residency under federal law on 30 June 1954; in 1959 she became a U.S. citizen. She worked as an independent scholar and later became an internationally known museum expert.

During a decade in New Mexico, Wittlin worked to establish a children’s museum, based in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and until 1960 served as director of a traveling museum for science and anthropology (Science Comes to You, Inc.). In 1961 she was among the first fellows of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Studies (Cambridge, MA), which enabled her to conduct research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

She subsequently held shorter research appointments at various university and museum institutions (UCSB; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), and from 1974 onward in California, where she founded and directed the Biopsychological Institute for Education.

Through her research and teaching—including adult and teacher education—Wittlin sought to encourage museums to take their social mission seriously: to value the concerns of the public, to consider people’s wishes in program planning, and to include all potentially interested individuals, not only students and teachers.

She died in Palo Alto, California.

Selected works The Museum. Its history and its tasks in education (1949) Museums. In search of a usable future (1970)