Foley took her first degree at
Swarthmore College in 1964. She then received an
MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) in English (1966) and an MA in Classics (1967) from
Yale University, and a PhD in Classical Philology from
Harvard University (1975). Her doctoral thesis was entitled 'Ritual Irony in the
Bacchae and Other Late
Euripidean Plays'. She taught at Swarthmore until 1979, when she moved to Barnard College, Columbia University. In 1998 she was the President of the American Philological Association (now the
Society for Classical Studies). In Spring 2008 she was the 94th
Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkeley; her Sather Lectures focused on the restaging of
Greek tragedies in America, and the ways in which modern productions of these plays explored themes of contemporary concern including slavery, race, the status of women, immigration, and identity. These lectures were later published as
Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage (2012). She has also been Visiting Professor at
Dartmouth College and
New York University. She is currently finishing a book on
Euripides'
Hecuba, coordinating an issue of the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association with Jean Howard on Tragedy, and working on tragic choruses. A conference, 'Female Agents: Gender, Drama, Reception, Performance', will be held in her honour 31 March-1 April 2023 at Barnard College. ==Selected publications ==