[3] 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.
The pinnacle of Mary Lefkowitz’s controversy surrounding Afrocentrism in the classics took form in her years-long scholarly debate with Martin Bernal.
The claims that Martin Bernal argues in his text alarmed Lefkowitz to such an extent that she wrote two extensive publications.
The first, Black Athena: Revisited,[5] is a collection of essays edited by Lefkowitz that responds directly to Bernal’s work with strong criticism.
[9] In this, she took a fiery tone against Bernal and defended her own claims while again working to refute Black Athena’s arguments.
Asante unveils what he believes is the true argument that these historians, Lefkowitz included, seek to make: “Their contention, in the face of evidence, is that it is improbable and even impossible that a black civilization could have any significant impact on a white civilization.” Asante emphasizes these arguments' connection to a history of colonialism and white supremacy, concluding that Black Athena: Revisited is a “helpful book for African scholars who are able to see in this volume all the agency that whites give to themselves and what they take away from Africans.”[12] In 2008, Lefkowitz published History Lesson, which The Wall Street Journal described as a "personal account of what she experienced as a result of questioning the veracity of Afrocentrism and the motives of its advocates.
A. Ben-Jochannan, the author of Africa: The Mother of Western Civilization, gave the Martin Luther King lecture at Wellesley in 1993.
"[16] Lefkowitz was married to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor Emeritus of Greek at Oxford University from 1982 until his death in 2009.