Barbara Clare Foley (born March 29, 1948) is an American literary scholar and a retired Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She has focused her research and teaching on U.S. literary radicalism, African American literature, and Marxist criticism. The author of six 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 and Marxist class analysis to both literary study and social movements.

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. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the antiwar, antiracist, and feminist movements, she began what became an extended involvement with left-wing politics. She taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1976 to 1980, and at Northwestern University from 1980 to 1987. 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 Northwestern University President Arnold Weber to overrule the Provost's decision and grant tenure to Foley. Following an appeal, Weber ultimately upheld the denial of tenure. When reflecting later on the incident, Foley said: "What did I learn from all this? That radical faculty, if they act on their beliefs, have no real protection. But that it is important to act on one's beliefs." From 1987 to 2019, she served 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. She was elected to the MLA Delegate Assembly four times, for a total of twelve years, as representative of Politics and the Profession; she served as the President of the MLA Radical Caucus from 2005 to 2017.

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 NOW-NJ Combating Racism Task Force.

Foley's first book, Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction (Cornell University Press, 1986), is a Marxist commentary on texts combining fact and fiction. 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. Telling the Truth was described in a review in Modern Philology as proposing "a powerful theory for dealing with the assertions made by fictional texts.... This is one of those rare books that will change the very way we think about literature."

Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Duke, 1993) reflects Foley's interest in Depression-era literary radicalism. 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. The reviewer for MELUS wrote that Foley "has written a superbly researched and argued book . . . 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."

Foley's third book, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Illinois, 2003), explores the radical origins of the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke's formulation of the New Negro as culture hero in his influential 1925 The New Negro: An Interpretation, Foley argues, was premised upon banishing the figure of the New Negro as social revolutionary that prevailed in the late 1910s and early 1920s. The reviewer for American Literature designated Spectres of 1919 "a carefully argued, nuanced presentation of the genesis of the Harlem Renaissance. Foley's breadth of knowledge in American radical history is impressive." In the Journal of American Studies, the book was described as "lucid and useful. ... A heavyweight intervention, it prompts significant rethinking of the ideological and representational strategies structuring the era."