Roy Foster has been teaching Irish history and literature , first at Birkbeck College, London, and then as the first Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford, for many years. Foster has published widely on Irish political, social and literary history. 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. Foster produced a two-part biography of W. B. Yeats, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and collaborated with Fintan Cullen on a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, ‘Conquering England: the Irish in Victorian London’. He was Professor of Modern British History at Birkbeck, University of London and held visiting fellowships at Oxford and Princeton universities. He was the Carroll Professor of Irish History from 1991 until 2016 at Hertford College, Oxford. In 2015, he was awarded the British Academy Medal for his book Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890–1923.