Mary Elizabeth Smith

Mary Elizabeth Smith (August 2, 1932 – December 10, 2004) was an American philologist. She was a professor at the University of New Mexico and Tulane University, where she was the 1993-1994 Martha and Donald Robertson Chair in Latin American Art, and she was president of the American Society for Ethnohistory from 1980 to 1981. A 1977 Guggenheim Fellow, she studied Mixtec writing and wrote such books as Las Glosas del Códice Colombino, Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico (1973), The Codex Tulane (1991), and The Codex López Ruiz (1998). Biography Mary Elizabeth Smith was born on August 2, 1932, in Three Rivers, Michigan.

In 1966, Smith started working at the University of New Mexico as an assistant professor, being promoted to associate professor in 1971 and full professor in 1977.

Smith studied Mixtec writing, having dedicated at least four decades of her academic career to the field. she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "a study of the pictorial manuscripts of the valley of Nochixtlán". In 1991, she and Ross Parmenter co-authored The Codex Tulane, a monograph on a Mixtec manuscript held in Tulane's Latin American Library. She later published another monograph in 1998, The Codex López Ruiz. In 2005, Tulane's Middle American Research Institute published a festschrift in her honor, Painted Books and Indigenous Knowledge in Mesoamerica: Manuscript Studies in Honor of Mary Elizabeth Smith by Elizabeth Hill Boone.