Neil Foley, Associate Director

Neil Foley, associate-director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, is the the Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Chair of History at Southern Methodist University. He received his PhD in in American Culture at the University of Michigan, then taught at the University of Texas before coming to SMU.  Professor Foley's current research centers on the changing constructions of race, citizenship, and transnational identity in the Borderlands, Mexico and the American West; Mexican immigration; and comparative civil rights politics of African Americans and Mexican Americans. He is the author of The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas(Berkeley, 1997); Quest for Equality:The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Harvard, 2010), and Mexicans in the Making of America (Harvard, 2014). He has co-authored (with John R. Chávez) Teaching Mexican American History (2002) and he is also the editor of Reflexiones: New Directions in Mexican American Studies (1998).  He is the co-editor of New York University Press series, American History and Culture, and served on the selection jury for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2004. Professor Foley is a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians and has lectured extensively in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. For a number of years he lived and taught in Mexico (Mexico City), Germany (Berlin, Heidelberg, Stuttgart), Spain (Salamanca, Zaragosa), and Japan (Misawa; Naha, Okinawa). He also spent two years living on aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean Sea where he taught sailors of the U.S. Navy's 6th Fleet in its Program for Afloat College Education (PACE).

Phone: 214-768-3753    

Email: foleyn@smu.edu

Office: Dallas Hall 302