Dr Foley is a historian of modern Ireland with a particular interest in birth control, maternity care, and the legal status of women in 20th century Ireland. She has a PhD in History from Dublin City University, and previously studied at Trinity College Dublin (MPhil) and University College Dublin (BA). She is the membership secretary of the Women’s History Association of Ireland. In 2019 she was awarded the Mac Curtain / Cullen essay prize by the Women’s History Association of Ireland, and the Maureen Murphy Award from the American Conference for Irish Studies.

As the current Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford, she is in the process of revising her doctoral thesis, entitled ‘“Women are Citizens”: Women’s groups and the Commission on the Status of Women in Ireland, c. 1967-1979’, into a monograph which will investigate, in a wider sense, the changing legal and social status of women in Ireland. To date her research has been published in Irish Economic History and Social History.