R. F. Foster

Robert Fitzroy Foster, publishing as R. F. Foster, is an Irish historian born in 1949 in Waterford, Ireland. He is renowned for his works on Irish history, including the acclaimed Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (1988), editor of The Oxford History of Ireland (1989), and a two-volume biography of W. B. Yeats that won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Foster held the Carroll Professorship of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford from 1991 to 2016, and has received numerous honors including fellowship in the British Academy and the Irish Presidential Distinguished Service Award.