Dr Fiona Slevin

Dr Fiona Slevin is a historian, author, and chartered director who divides her time between business consulting and historical research. Her career has traversed two distinct disciplines: the fast-paced world of international business and technology, and the archival rigor of academic history. She holds a PhD from University College Dublin (UCD) and brings decades of corporate governance experience to her work in heritage advocacy. Her historical research focuses primarily on the social and economic development of post-Famine rural Ireland, with a specific emphasis on the resilience of small towns in County Leitrim.

Raised in Mohill, County Leitrim, Dr Slevin has maintained a lifelong connection to the region that is now the subject of her scholarship. She is a graduate of the University of Limerick (UL), where she completed her primary degree before embarking on an international career. Her professional trajectory has been marked by a commitment to education across different fields. In 2012, she formalized her business expertise by qualifying as a Chartered Director (CDir), a credential relating to corporate governance and board leadership. In a significant pivot later in her career, she returned to academia to pursue doctoral studies at UCD. She was awarded her PhD in History in 2024, producing a thesis that examined the economic resilience and commercial dynamics of Mohill during the post-Famine period (1850–1875).

Prior to establishing herself as a professional historian, Dr Slevin built a career in international business and the technology sector. Her early professional years were spent in London, where she worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. This role was followed by a period in the energy sector in Aberdeen, where she focused on information technology (IT) systems implementation and change management.

Moving into corporate strategy, Dr Slevin joined United Distillers & Vintners (UDV), where she held a strategic role during its merger with Grand Metropolitan to form Diageo plc. Her work at Diageo involved leading digital transformation projects and facilitating strategy workshops for senior executives, experiences that bridged the gap between traditional corporate structures and the emerging digital economy.

Transitioning from the corporate world to entrepreneurship, she co-founded Haptica, a medtech company specializing in augmented reality (AR) for surgical simulation. As Chief Executive Officer (CEO), she oversaw the company’s growth and eventual entry into the United States market, leading the business until its acquisition in 2012. Following this exit, she served as Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Orreco, a company that applies data science and biomarkers to elite sports performance.

Dr Slevin’s historical work utilizes quantitative data to analyze rural economies, an approach that reflects her professional experience in business. Her publications explore the social and economic fabric of nineteenth-century Ireland:

• By Hereditary Virtues: A History of Lough Rynn (2006, updated 2020) provides a history of the Clements family and the Lough Rynn estate, analyzing the management style of the 3rd Earl of Leitrim and the estate’s economic operations. Rather than reducing the Earl to a caricature of villainy, Dr Slevin analyzes him as an economic manager, detailing his obsession with estate improvement and the cold economic logic that underpinned his harsh management style.
• Recipes & Remedies of Lough Rynn (2008, updated 2024) serves as a social history collection, reproducing recipes and remedies from 19th-century estate journals. It contrasts the protein-rich meals of the castle with the subsistence living of the tenantry, thus humanizing the abstract data of the era.
• Cherishing Heritage Preserving Community (2018) documents the history of the Upper Leeson Street Area Residents’ Association (Ulsara) in Dublin, chronicling efforts to preserve the architectural character of this urban area.
• Surviving and Thriving in Post-Famine Ireland (2024) is a reproduction of her PhD thesis; it analyzes the economic flows in Mohill between 1850 and 1875, tracking farm viability, shop credit, and the impact of emigrant remittances.

Dr Fiona Slevin’s research challenges the narrative of economic stagnation in post-Famine rural Ireland. She focuses on the “flow of money” in small towns and has made contributions to the history of women in rural economies. In 2023, she was awarded the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland (ESHSI) New Researchers Prize for her paper on female leaseholders and business owners, highlighting the economic agency of women in the nineteenth century. Additionally, she investigates the financial impact of the diaspora, specifically the role of remittances in sustaining rural communities.

Beyond her writing, Dr Slevin is a regular speaker at academic conferences and local history societies and has developed innovative approaches to engaging people in history, from film-making to guided trails, to digital storymapping. Most recently, she developed a digital and print storymap of Mohill, County Leitrim. In her heritage consulting work, she helps families trace their ancestors, going beyond genealogy and family trees to provide contextual, personalized stories that bring the past to life.