Center for Leadership
Studies

At University of Missouri-Columbia, Dr. Foley is Curators' Professor and William H. Byler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. In addition, he serves as the Director of The Center for eResearch and The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition.

Dr. Foley is also the Academic Director for the Master of Arts in Oral Traditions at The Graduate Institute. In MAOL he joins faculty to ground the possibility that organizations are a reality arising in oral tradition. From here we come to see the power of the spoken word and begin to connect how all of what we say as leaders shapes the reality in which we work.

Dr. Foley’s specialty is comparative oral traditions. Over the past fifteen years his major publication has reflected this focus: The Theory of Oral Composition (1998), Traditional Oral Epic (1990), Immanent Art (1991), The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995), Teaching Oral Traditions (1998), Homer’s Traditional Art (1999), and How to Read an Oral Poem (2002).

Dr. Foley serves as Director of Missouri's Center for Studies in Oral Tradition (www.oraltradition.org) and editor of the journal Oral Tradition (journal.oraltradition.org) and two series of books (Lord Studies in Oral Tradition, at Garland, and Voices in Performance and Text, at the University of Illinois Press). Recently he completed essays for the Cambridge Companion to Homer, a Festschrift in Germany, a collection of essays in South Africa, and Unlocking the Wordhoard, a volume to be published by the University of Toronto Press.

Among Dr. Foley’s favorite teaching assignments is the comparatively oriented course entitled "Oral Tradition." In the works is a course on "The History of the Word," which will track that elusive thought-byte from textless times to the electronic present.