Roy is a Professor of Irish History and Literature 

Foster’s best-selling Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988), written and published while he was at Birkbeck, was an influential example of historical scholarship whose sensitivities to the different but interwoven cultures of Northern Ireland opened up dialogues between communities. It was his emphasis on complexity or, as Foster put it, on the “varieties of Irishness”, that changed the way Irish history was understood.