Sylvia Hope Leith-Ross, MBE (née Ruxton) (30 September 1884 – 12 February 1980) was an English anthropologist and writer who worked primarily in Nigeria.

Sylvia's memoir, Cocks in the Dawn (1944), recalls this time as the beginning of her lifelong attachment to France.

[1] In 1907, as a new bride, she moved to Zungeru in Nigeria, where her husband, Arthur Leith-Ross, was the chief transport officer for the British protectorate.

She was in Nigeria for the rest of the second World War, in part to provide intelligence on the French colonies to the Political and Economic Research Organization.

Her last book published in her lifetime, Nigerian Pottery (1970), records her findings in photographs and text, as a catalogue to an exhibit she organised at the Jos Museum.