Following his doctoral studies, Foley undertook fieldwork in Yugoslavia, confirming and extending prior research on living oral traditions by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Based on this fieldwork, he continued the work of Francis P. Magoun in applying findings to other ethnolinguistic areas, as well as refining the theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition. After receiving his doctorate, Foley was assistant professor of English at Emory University until 1979, when he became associate professor at the University of Missouri, where he became regular professor in 1983 and stayed for the remainder of his career. Stints at other universities included an appointment as visiting professor at the University of Belgrade and visiting fellow at Harvard University. He directed summer institutes for teachers for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1987, 1989, 1991, 1992 and 1994. He gave more than 250 invited lectures throughout the United States as well as in China, India, Russia, Mongolia, Japan, throughout Africa and Europe, and the United States. Foley was awarded grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, and other institutions, and was a fellow of the Finnish Folklore Society and the American Folklore Society. In addition to providing the infrastructure for the comparatively new academic discipline of oral tradition by means of organizing conferences, producing the first bibliography, history and methodological guide and classroom textbook on the subject, his principal contributions involved the study of oral traditional performance in the field, and the application of those observations both to ancient texts and to the emerging secondary orality of the Internet. He taught in the departments of Classical Studies, including both literature and language, English, and German and Russian Studies. Additionally, he had been an adjunct professor of anthropology since 1992. Foley founded the academic journal Oral Tradition in 1986, converting it to an open access publishing model in 2006. He also founded and directed two academic centers, the Center for the Studies in Oral Tradition and the Center for eResearch, which fosters cross-disciplinary internet-related research. He wrote or edited twenty books, and authored more than 160 scholarly articles. did a retrospective of his work in 2001. Additionally, he edited three series of books. Foley was most recently the Academic Director for the Oral Traditions program at the Graduate Institute. Foley retired from the University of Missouri in 2011, and died May 3, 2012 at the age of 65.
Select bibliography
Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography. New York, 1985.
Teaching Oral Traditions. New York, 1988.
Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song. Berkeley, 1990 Rpt. 1993.
Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic. Bloomington, 1991.
The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington, 1988. Rpt. 1992.
