Ian Milligan FRHistS

Professor of History & Director, School of Social, Political, and Historical Research

Author of Averting the Digital Dark Age (Johns Hopkins, 2024).

“Milligan creates something that is undoubtedly a history, but which at times has a journalistic writing style without losing academic rigor … the book offers a deep and important story about the efforts to preserve the early web.”
— Adam Crymble, review of Averting the Digital Dark Age (2025)

“History in the Age of Abundance? represents a detailed manual for rethinking the historical discipline to train new scholars to deal with the new formats of born-electric text, their preservation, and their scale.”
— Jo Guldi, AHR Review Roundtable (2020)

About

Ian Milligan (he/him) is a Professor of History at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has authored or co-authored six books, most recently Averting the Digital Dark Age (Johns Hopkins, 2024), and is at work on “On Every Screen” (working title), a history of how ordinary people used the early internet to make sense of the September 11th attacks.

He is the inaugural Director of Waterloo’s School of Social, Political, and Historical Research, which brings together seven departments in the humanities and social sciences. He previously served as Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight & Integrity, providing campus-wide leadership on research ethics, compliance, safeguarding, and research data management. From 2017 to 2023 he led the Archives Unleashed project, an interdisciplinary, multi-institution team whose work is now offered as a service by the Internet Archive.