Mary R. Lefkowitz (born April 30, 1935) is an American classical scholar and Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. She is best known to non-Classicists for her book, Not Out of Africa (1996), where she criticizes the Afrocentric theory that Greek civilization was "stolen" from Ancient Egypt.
Mary R. Lefkowitz is an American classical scholar and Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. She is best known to non-Classicists for her book, Not Out of Africa (1996), where she criticizes the Afrocentric theory that Greek civilization was "stolen" from Ancient Egypt. She is the widow of Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, former Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek at Oxford University
Lefkowitz earned her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1957, Phi Beta Kappa with honors in Greek, and received her Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard University) in 1961. She returned to Wellesley College in 1959 as an instructor in Greek. In 1979 she was named Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, a position she held until her retirement in 2005. Lefkowitz holds an honorary degree from Trinity College (1996), which cited her "deep concern for intellectual integrity," and also from the University of Patras (1999) and from Grinnell College (2000). In 2004 she received a Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal. In 2006 she was awarded a National Humanities Medal "for outstanding excellence in scholarship and teaching." In 2008 she was the recipient of a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award.[1]
