Mary Lefkowitz - Biography

Biography

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.

Lefkowitz has published on subjects including mythology, women in antiquity, Pindar, and fiction in ancient biography. She came to the attention of a wider audience through her criticism of the claims of Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in her book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. In Black Athena Revisited (1996), which she edited with Guy MacLean Rogers, her colleague at Wellesley College, the ideas of Martin Bernal are further scrutinized.