Roy Foster

Abstract

R.F. (Roy) Foster holds the only endowed chair of Irish History in Britain. He was born in Waterford, Ireland, in 1949 and educated in both Ireland and the United States. A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where he was a Foundation Scholar in history, he subsequently became Professor of Modern British History at Birkbeck College, University of London, as well as holding visiting Fellowships at St Antony’s College, Oxford; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Princeton University. In 1991 he became the first Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford and was elected a Fellow of Hertford College. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1986, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1992, and has received honorary degrees from the University of Aberdeen, the Queen’s University of Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, and the National University of Ireland, as well as an Honorary Fellowship at Birkbeck College. In the spring of 2002, he was the Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton.