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Robert Fitzroy 'Roy' Foster FBA FRHistS FRSL (born 16 January 1949), 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.
Foster was born on 16 January 1949 in Waterford, to two teachers: Betty Foster (née Fitzroy), a primary teacher, and 'Fef' (Frederick) 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. [1] Roy attended Newtown School in 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 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.
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 (1989), and written Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (1988) and several books of essays. He collaborated with Fintan Cullen on a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Conquering England: the Irish in Victorian London. [2] Foster produced a much-acclaimed two-part biography of W. B. Yeats, [3] [4] 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. [5]
In 2000, Foster was a Booker Prize judge. [6]
He has been married to the novelist and critic Aisling Foster (née O'Conor Donelan) since 1972; the couple have two children. [7]
In 1989, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) [8] and in 2010 he was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy (Hon. MRIA). [9] He is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), [10] and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). [11]
He gave the 2006 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. [12] In 2015, he was awarded the British Academy Medal for his book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890–1923. [13]
In 2017, he was made an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin. [14]
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. [15]
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Bryan Walter Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne, was a British lawyer, poet, novelist and socialite. He was an heir to part of the Anglo-Irish Guinness family brewing fortune, and briefly married to Diana Mitford, one of the Mitford sisters.
Rosamond Deborah McKitterick is an English medieval historian. She is an expert on the Frankish kingdoms in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, who uses palaeographical and manuscript studies to illuminate aspects of the political, cultural, intellectual, religious, and social history of the Early Middle Ages. From 1999 until 2016 she was Professor of Medieval History and director of research at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College and Professor Emerita of Medieval History in the University of Cambridge.
The Irish Literary Revival was a flowering of Irish literary talent in the late 19th and early 20th century. It includes works of poetry, music, art, and literature.
Sir David Nicholas Cannadine is a British author and historian who specialises in modern history, Britain and the history of business and philanthropy. He is currently the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, a visiting professor of history at Oxford University, and the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He was president of the British Academy between 2017 and 2021, the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He also serves as the chairman of the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London and vice-chair of the editorial board of Past & Present.
John Haffenden is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Sheffield.
Sir Frederick Maurice Powicke was an English medieval historian. He was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, a professor at Queen's University, Belfast, and the Victoria University of Manchester, and from 1928 until his retirement Regius Professor at the University of Oxford. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1946.
Nicholas Andrew Martin Rodger FSA FRHistS FBA is a historian of the Royal Navy and senior research fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Marianne Elliott is an Irish historian who was appointed OBE in the 2000 Birthday Honours.
Thomas Mowbray Charles-Edwards is an emeritus academic at the University of Oxford. He formerly held the post of Jesus Professor of Celtic and is a Professorial Fellow at Jesus College.
Sir Keith Vivian Thomas is a Welsh historian of the early modern world based at Oxford University. He is best known as the author of Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World. From 1986 to 2000, he was president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
James Francis Lydon was an Irish educator and historian. He served as the Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1980 to 1993, and authored numerous works, particularly on the medieval history of Ireland.
Richard Sharpe,, Hon. was a British historian and academic, who was Professor of Diplomatic at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. His broad interests were the history of medieval England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. He had a special concern with first-hand work on the primary sources of medieval history, including the practices of palaeography, diplomatic and the editorial process, as well as the historical and legal contexts of medieval documents. He was the general editor of the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, and editor of a forthcoming edition of the charters of King Henry I of England.
Alexander Norman "Derry" Jeffares AM was an Irish literary scholar.
Sir Jonah Barrington, K.C., was an Irish lawyer, judge and politician. Jonah Barrington is most notable for his amusing and popular memoirs of life in late 18th-century Ireland; for his opposition to the Act of Union in 1800; and for his removal from the judiciary by both Houses of Parliament in 1830, still a unique event.
Thomas Elrington was an Irish academic and bishop who served as the 25th Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1811 to 1820. He was Donegall Lecturer in Mathematics from 1790 to 1795 at Trinity College Dublin. While at Trinity College, he also served as Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics from 1795 to 1799 and Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy from 1799 to 1807.
Desmond King is the Andrew W. Mellon professor of American Government at Nuffield College, Oxford. King was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
William Perceval D.D. was an Irish priest in the first decades of the 18th century.
Mary Teresa Josephine Webber, is a British palaeographer, medievalist, and academic. She has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1997 and Professor of Palaeography at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge since 2018. Webber studied Modern History as an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford.
David Patrick Brian Fitzpatrick was an Irish historian best known for his work on Irish independence and emigration. He was professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Roger Andrew Stalley is a scholar and teacher in medieval architecture and sculpture. His speciality is Early Gothic and Romanesque architecture and sculpture in England and Western Europe with a particular focus on Irish architecture and art. He has published numerous papers and books including Cistercian Monasteries of Ireland in 1987, for which he was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion in 1988 by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and Early Medieval Architecture in 1999 for the Oxford History of Art series. He is noted for his innovative teaching practices for example, The Medieval Architecture Online Teaching Project, and is recognised in the 2021 publication Mapping New Territories in Art and Architectural Histories, Essays in Honour of Roger Stalley.
