[1] On a Fulbright Travelling Scholarship he was accepted into the PhD program of the University of Oregon, USA (Department of English) and received his doctorate in 1970 with a dissertation on the Irish fiction writers Brian Moore, Michael McLaverty and Benedict Kiely.
That book, along with Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Lilliput Press, 1991) and numerous articles, identified him as a prominent participant in the lively and contentious literary-critical debates waging in Ireland at the same time as the political conflict known as "the Troubles".
Wishing to perform a comparable cultural rehabilitation task in Ireland for its superb natural history, Foster (an amateur naturalist) conceived and co-edited Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History (Lilliput Press, 1997), a volume with 28 contributing writers and researchers and published on both sides of the Atlantic.
The lectures Foster gave as the inaugural National University of Ireland Visiting Professor (Maynooth, 2001) were published as Recoveries: Neglected Episodes in Irish Cultural History 1860–1914 (University College Dublin Press, 2002) and included the evolution debate in Belfast, pioneering field naturalism in Ireland, and Belfast's cutting-edge applied science culture.
The play was first produced in Belfast by Kabosh Theatre Company with the Ulster actor Lalor Roddy in the role of Pirrie.
With the distinguished actor Ian McElhinney from Game of Thrones playing Pirrie, A Better Boy has been performed in Bangor, County Down, Belfast, Brussels and Paris.
In 2014, Notting Hill Editions published Pilgrims of the Air, a literary meditation on the American passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), the most populous recorded species of bird that collapsed in numbers in the 1890s and became extinct in the wild around 1900.