R. F. Foster (historian)
Robert Fitzroy Foster, publishing as R. F. Foster, is an Irish historian and academic. He was the Carroll Professor of Irish History from 1991 until 2016 at Hertford College, Oxford.
Early life
Foster was born on 16 January 1949 in Waterford, to two teachers: Betty Foster, a primary teacher, and 'Fef' Ernest Foster, a teacher of Irish. His father, Fef, was a native of Drung, a tiny hamlet and parish located between Cavan Town and Cootehill in County Cavan where Roy's grandfather Frederick Foster signed the Ulster Covenant in 1912. Roy attended Newtown School in Waterford, a multi-denominational school that was founded as a Quaker school in 1798. He won a scholarship to attend St. Andrew's School in Delaware for a year before reading history at Trinity College Dublin. He was awarded an M.A. and PhD 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 College, 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, and written Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 and several books of essays. He collaborated with Fintan Cullen on a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Conquering England: the Irish in Victorian London. Foster produced a much-acclaimed two-part biography of W. B. Yeats, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Seamus Deane wrote a review of the biography in which he quoted the last line of Yeats' poem The Municipal Gallery Revisited: "My glory was that I had such friends", and stated that Yeats was also lucky to have Foster as his biographer.
In 2000, Foster was a Booker Prize judge.
Personal life
He has been married to the novelist and critic Aisling Foster since 1972; the couple have two children.Honours
In 1989, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy and in 2010 he was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy.He is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
He gave the 2006 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. In 2015, he was awarded the British Academy Medal for his book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890–1923.
In 2017, he was made an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin.
In 2021 Foster was awarded an Irish Presidential Distinguished Service Award in Arts, Culture & Sport.
Foster received the Lifetime Achievement Award as one of the Irish Book Awards in November 2023.
Works
Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His Family- ‘To The Northern Counties Station: Lord Randolph Churchill and the Prelude to the Orange Card’, in F. S. L. Lyons & R. A. J. Hawkins, ed., Ireland Under the Union: Varieties of Tension: Essays in Honour of T. W. Moody Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life Modern Ireland 1600–1972
- ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Ireland W. B. Yeats, A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland W. B. Yeats – A Life, II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970 Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 On Seamus Heaney
MiscellaneousPolitical Novels and Nineteenth-Century History
- ed., Hubert Butler, The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue, and Do., in French trans. as L’Envahisseur est venu en pantoufles
- ''The Story of Ireland: an Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 1 December 1994''