Born in New York City, Foley attended Radcliffe College from 1965 to 1969, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude; she earned her Ph.D. with Honors from the University of Chicago in 1976.

[4][5] In 1987, the Modern Language Association (MLA) passed a resolution appealing to NU's President Arnold Weber to overrule the Provost's decision and grant tenure to Foley.

Foley has been the recipient of awards for both teaching and scholar-activism at Rutgers University-Newark, as well of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities[8] and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Taking issue with post-structuralist and reader-response theories of discourse, Foley argues that fiction contains propositional content; she offers a historical materialist overview of the novel's changing modes of conveying cognition of the world beyond the text.

Arguing against the Cold War paradigms that continue to shape scholarship on left-wing writing, Foley examines contemporaneous debates over art and propaganda, investigates the relationship between left politics and literary form, and proposes an anatomy of the modes of proletarian fiction.

that is a must read for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of the difficult project of creating a radical culture sensitive to issues of race, class and gender in the effort to build an egalitarian society.

"[16] In Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (Duke, 2010), Foley shifts the focus of her scholarship onto a detailed engagement with a single text.

Her investigation of the thousands of pages of draft manuscript and notes yields the conclusion that the novel familiar to readers was the product of multiple reconceptualizations and revisions.

"[18] Foley's 2014 book, Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution (Illinois, 2014), displays her growing interest in biography as a necessary component of Marxist criticism.

Although the ability of capitalism to meet the needs of the majority of the world's people is being increasingly called into question, and many people look to literature for insight into the relationship between consciousness and material reality, there have been no general introductions to Marxist literary criticism since the books published by Terry Eagleton (Marxism and Literary Criticism) and Raymond Williams (Marxism and Literature) in the late 1970s.

The book culminates in an extended study of a wide range of literary works—from the poetry of Matthew Arnold to E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey to the proletarian verse of Langston Hughes—that illustrate Marxism's distinct contribution to an understanding of the connections between literature and society.