Dr Liam A. Heffron, Historian
I believe an actor and a historian are on either side of the same stage, each finding and telling authentic stories of human experience to inform and move our audience. With A.I. dramatically disrupting how we connect with each other and seek meaning in our lives — authenticity, real human relationships and in-person interactions are at a premium. So, in a world of social media, discussion forums, digitally delivered news and online entertainment, our vocation as storytellers has never been more important or necessary…
University of Galway, Explore Campus Innovation Award, 2019
BBC’s Who do you think you are? TV series
Liam A. Heffron winner of the NUI Galway Award for Innovation Partnership, 2015
Affiliations: Member of the Irish Association of Professional Historians (IAPH), Chairperson of St Cormac’s (heritage) Society and Mayo GAA History Officer. Former member of; Mayo County Council’s Corporate, Education, Culture, Heritage and Library Services Strategic Policy Committee (2019-2023) and the Creative Momentum Regional Industry Advisory Group member - an EU transnational project to support the creative industries sector (2015-2018).
LIFE imitating ART…
Following his first class honours M.A. at the University of Galway, Liam Alex was awarded a history Ph.D. for his pioneering research on the social causes of the local Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War. He has part-published his work in the books No Revolution: Igniting War in North Mayo, 1917-1923 and Spirit of Revolution, Ireland from below, 1917–1923. Dr Heffron has also provided content authenticity services for TV and film productions most recently for the BBC’s Who do you think you are? and RTE’s The Battle for Rural Ireland’. As a founder of St Cormac’s (Heritage) Society, he has led efforts for the protection and promotion of local heritage in his native west of Ireland. Liam Alex is also involved in the Healing Through History project (2025) creating an online community of genealogy and local history enthusiasts, to heal and inspire both themselves and those around them.
Aside from his academic interests, Dr Heffron is an experienced and trained actor, who recently experienced life imitating art, when playing the skeptical historian, Finbarr, in the award-winning movie Prospect House (2023) - his acting portfolio is more fully explored here. He also pens a weekly column in the Western People newspaper, repeated in his blog, ‘Hollywood and Heffron’.
As a Ph.D. student Liam Alex won the NUI Galway Explore Campus Innovation award for his 2019 Digital Humanities project to digitally archive over 1,230,000 images from obsolete primary school records books. While Mayo GAA history officer he also managed the www.beomayo.ie living history project, to create an online repository for heritage records of GAA clubs and their supporters, in county Mayo.
Liam Alex’s Ph.D. thesis examined the revolutionary intersection of land hunger, social justice impulse and memory, in a west of Ireland community over the longue durée of 1793-1925. This micro-history case-study over such an extended period of time, enabled the multi-generational observation of otherwise invisible or overlooked social processes and structures as they developed in a here-to-fore undocumented region. Among other conclusions, Dr Heffron’s work found that the impulse for rebellion is not necessarily based on poverty, injustice or oppression, but on a ‘spirit of revolution’ which successfully diffused and ignited through intra-group demarcations, catalysed by social memory and social status — and may also apply in modern protest movements.