Barbara Clare Foley
 |
Barbara Foley (born 1948), Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, focuses her research and teaching on U.S. literary radicalism, African American literature, and Marxist criticism. The author of five books and over seventy scholarly articles, review essays, and book chapters, she has published on literary theory, academic politics, US proletarian literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the writers Ralph Ellison and Jean Toomer. Throughout her career, her work has emphasized the centrality of antiracism to both literary study and social movements.
Born in New York City, Foley attended Harvard University from 1965–69, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude; she earned her Ph.D. with Honors from the University of Chicago in 1976. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she began what became an extended involvement with left-wing politics. She taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1976–80 and at Northwestern University from 1980-87. She was denied tenure by the Provost at Northwestern University on the grounds of “grave professional misconduct”—stemming from her participation in a 1985 campus demonstration against Adolfo Calero, a Nicaraguan contra leader- even though she had been approved for tenure by her department, the A&P Committee, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. 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. Since 1987 Foley has been on the faculty at Rutgers University-Newark.
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 and the American Council of Learned Societies. Foley has been elected to the MLA Delegate Assembly four times, for a total of twelve years, as representative of Politics and the Profession; she has presented papers at the annual MLA convention for 25 of the past 27 years and currently serves as the President of the MLA Radical Caucus. Since 2000 she has been on the Editorial Board and Manuscript Committee at the Marxist journal Science & Society, where she is currently Vice-President. She has lectured on American literature and Marxist theory in France and Cuba, as well as during four trips to China, where several of her works have been translated into Chinese. Since 1990 she has served as Chair of the National Organization for Women-NJ Task Force on Combating Racism.
...
Wikipedia