Elizabeth Jeffreys

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Elizabeth Mary Jeffreys FAHA (née Brown) was a British scholar of Byzantium, born on 22 July 1941 and died on 12 September 2023. She served as Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and was a Professorial Fellow of Exeter College from 1996 to 2006.

Her education began at Blackheath High School. She studied classics at Girton College, Cambridge, and in 1963 moved to Oxford to pursue a BLitt in medieval Greek and French at St Anne’s College, writing a thesis on fourteenth‑century romances and studying modern Greek with Robin Fletcher.

Jeffreys taught Classics at Mary Datchelor School (1965) and then became a senior resident fellow at the Warburg Institute. She spent 1972–74 at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, DC, and in 1974 moved to Greece as a research fellow at the University of Ioannina with her husband Michael Jeffreys. In 1976 she went to Australia, holding fellowships at the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Sydney, and teaching at Macquarie University and the University of Sydney. She was a founding member of the Australian (now Australasian) Association for Byzantine Studies in 1978 and returned to Dumbarton Oaks as a Fellow in 1983–84.

In 1996 she was appointed to the Oxford chair, succeeding Cyril Mango, and returned to the United Kingdom. She served as Sub-Rector of Exeter College (1997–99). In 2006 she helped convene the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies in London and then retired as Emerita, while continuing scholarly work, including a project on Manganeios Prodromos. She received a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship (2008–09) and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1993) and an Honorary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Her notable works include Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions. Elizabeth Jeffreys passed away from complications of a stroke at the age of 82.