Mary Lefkowitz

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Mary R. Lefkowitz (born 1935) and Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, USA.

She earned her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1957, and received her Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Radcliffe College (Harvard University) in 1961.

She has published on subjects including mythology, women in antiquity, Pindar, and fiction in ancient biography. She has come to the attention of a wider audience through her criticism of the claims of Afrocentrism in relation to ancient Greek culture.

In Black Athena Revisited (1996), which she edited with her Wellesley colleague, Guy MacLean Rogers, the ideas of Martin Bernal are subjected to detailed scrutiny by experts.

She is married to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, one-time Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University.

[edit] Critics

One of her key critics is Molefi Asante who stated "The aim of Professor Lefkowitz is to support the unsupportable idea of a miraculous Greece and thus to enhance a white supremacist myth of the ancient world." Race in Antiquity. However, most of her critics refrain from pointing out facual errors in her work and confine their criticism to ad-hominem attacks.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Books

The Victory Ode : An Introduction (1976)
Heroines and Hysterics (1981)
The Lives of the Greek Poets (1981)
Women's Life in Greece and Rome (1982) editor with Maureen Fant
Women in Greek Myth (1986)
First-person Fictions : Pindar's Poetic "I" (1991)
Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History (1996)
Black Athena Revisited (1996) editor with Guy Maclean Rogers
Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths (2003)