Name R. Foster Role Historian | ||
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Education Trinity College, Dublin | ||
Robert Fitzroy 'Roy' Foster, FBA, FRHistS, FRSL (born 16 January 1949), publishing as R. F. Foster, is a revisionist Irish historian and academic. He is the Carroll Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford in the UK.
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Early life
Foster was born on 16 January 1949 in Waterford, to two teachers: Betty Foster (née Fitzroy), a primary teacher, and 'Fef' (Ernest) Foster, a teacher of Irish. He attended Newtown School, Waterford, a multi-denominational school that was founded as a Quaker school in the late 18th century. He won a scholarship to attend St. Andrew's School for a year before reading history at Trinity College, Dublin. He was awarded an M.A. and Ph.D. by Trinity College, where he was taught by T. W. Moody and F.S.L. Lyons, and was elected a scholar in History and Political Science in 1969.
Academic career
Prior to his appointment to the Carroll professorship, he was Professor of Modern British History at Birkbeck, University of London, University of London, and held visiting fellowships at St Antony's College, Oxford, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Princeton University. Based in London as well as at Hertford College in Oxford, Foster visits Ireland frequently.
His work is generally published under the name R. F. Foster.
He has written early biographies of Charles Stewart Parnell and Lord Randolph Churchill, edited The Oxford History of Ireland (1989), and written Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 (1988) and several books of essays. Foster produced a much acclaimed two-part biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and collaborated with Fintan Cullen on a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, 'Conquering England: the Irish in Victorian London'. Seamus Deane wrote a review in the Irish Times of 27 September 2003 quoting W.B. Yeats as saying "My glory was that I had such friends". Deane then suggests that Yeats was also lucky in having such a biographer as Foster.
In 2000 Foster was a judge in the Man Booker Prize.
Personal life
He has been married to the novelist and critic Aisling Foster (née O'Conor Donelan) since 1972 and they have two children.
Honours
In 1989, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).
In 2015, he was awarded the British Academy Medal for his book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923.
Works
Essay collections
Miscellaneous