Mary Elizabeth Smith 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 (1966), Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico (1973), The Codex Tulane (1991), and The Codex López Ruiz (1998).