Elsa Mahler

Elsa-Eugenie Mahler (15 November 1882 - 30 June 1970) was a Russian-born scholar of Slavic studies and folk arts who came to Switzerland in 1919/20 and was refused permission to return home by the new Soviet government. In 1938 she became the first woman to be appointed to a professorship at the University of Basel.

Life Elsa-Eugenie Mahler was born in Moscow where her father Josef Mathias Eduard Mahler, a merchant-engineer originally from Switzerland, had settled. Her mother, born Louise Sivers, came from the Baltic German community. She then travelled to the west, studying classical philology and Art history at Berlin and Munich, but she returned to Saint Petersburg in 1913 without having completed a degree course. The First World War broke out in August 1914 and she spent the next few years as a teacher, working in a succession of Saint Petersburg schools. She continued to teach in Petrograd during the Russian Revolution and during the early part of the ensuing civil war, until the schools were closed down. The second book, "Die russischen dörflichen Hochzeitsbräuche" (1960, "Russian village wedding customs") (dedicated to Basel University in celebration of its 500h anniversary) has been described as "an early controversial folkloric monograph on gender issues".