Meilutė Julija Lukšienė née Matjošaitytė (20 August 1913 – 16 October 2009) was a Lithuanian university professor, cultural historian, and activist.

Due to tightening Soviet censorship after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the department was attacked for not devoting enough attention to communist literature and Lukšienė was dismissed from the university in early 1959.

She then worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Pedagogy (merged into the Education Development Center [lt]) until retirement in 1997.

[1] During World War I, they retreated to Russia and for a while lived in Voronezh which had a large number of Lithuanian refugees.

In 1918, Lukšienė moved to Vilnius where her mother worked at the hospital of the Lithuanian Sanitary Aid Society.

[1] After her graduation in 1931, her mother decided to move from Vilnius (which was then part of the Second Polish Republic) to Kaunas in interwar Lithuania.

[1] Her students included Justinas Marcinkevičius, Janina Degutytė, Judita Vaičiūnaitė, Tomas Venclova, Juozas Aputis.

[4] After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Soviet authorities increased their ideological control of Vilnius University which saw some improvements under rector Juozas Bulavas during the Khrushchev Thaw.

[7] Lukšienė then worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Pedagogy (merged into the Education Development Center [lt]) until retirement in 1997.

[3] Lukšienė became a member of the initiative group that established the Reform Movement of Lithuania Sąjūdis in June 1988.

[9] In 2004, the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore published Laiko prasmės (The Meaning of Time) by Lukšienė.

It contains memoirs by her mother Julija Biliūnienė and Lukšienė's reflections on the development of the mentality of the Lithuanian intelligentsia.

[12] The Ministry of Education and Science established two awards named after Lukšienė: one in 2010 to school teachers and second in 2013 to university professors and academics.