Roy Foster - Biography#

Robert Fitzroy ['Roy'] Foster was born in Waterford, Ireland, and educated in Ireland and the USA. He studied history at Trinity College, Dublin, before teaching at Birkbeck College, University of London, and subsequently becoming the first Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of many books on modern Irish history and culture, including Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1989), Paddy and Mr Punch (1993), The Irish Story: telling tales and making it up in Ireland (2001), Luck and the Irish: a brief history of change, 1970-2000 (2007), Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances (2011) and the prizewinning two-volume biography of W.B.Yeats, The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914 (1997) and The Arch Poet, 1915-1939 (2003). He has also written biographies of Charles Stewart Parnell (1977) and Lord Randolph Churchill (1981). His most recent book is Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland, c 1890-1923 (2014). He is also a well-known cultural commentator, broadcaster and critic.

He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Aberdeen, Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, the National University of Ireland, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, the University of Edinburgh and University College, Dublin; he is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an honorary Fellow of Birkbeck College University of London, an honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

His work has been noted for its interrogation and re-interpretation of some controversial themes in Irish history and Anglo-Irish relations, and also for moving easily between the disciplines of history and literature. On his retirement from Oxford in 2016 the Chair of Irish History in the University is to be re-named the Foster Chair in his honour.