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).

As Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight & Integrity, he provides campus-wide leadership across research ethics, compliance, safeguarding, and research data management, co-leading the university’s RDM strategy through to implementation. As PI of the Archives Unleashed project (2017–2023), he worked with and helped lead an interdisciplinary, multi-institution research team whose work is now offered as a service by the Internet Archive.

He has supervised graduate students across history, digital humanities, and information science, and has developed interdisciplinary courses that bring computational methods into the humanities classroom. At the undergraduate level, he has taught Canadian histories, a long history of the internet (stretching back to the printing press), and methodological courses for both historians and interdisciplinary audiences.

He is co-editor of the journal Internet Histories and sits on advisory boards including the Canadian Commission for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Advisory Committee and UCLA Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) board. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario, with his partner and two children.

Research

Milligan's research explores how web archives and other born-digital traces can be used as historical evidence and how they are transforming historical practice. His most recent book, Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory (Johns Hopkins, 2024), builds on earlier monographs: The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age (Cambridge, 2022), History in the Age of Abundance (McGill-Queen's, 2019), and Rebel Youth (UBC Press, 2014). He also co-authored Exploring Big Historical Data (2022) and co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Web History (2018).

Leadership & Service

As Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight & Integrity, Milligan provides campus-wide leadership for research integrity and compliance. His portfolio includes the Office of Research Ethics, safeguarding research, research health & safety, bibliometrics, emergency research issues, and campus research awards. He co-led the university's Research Data Management strategy and continues to support its implementation.

He sits on advisory boards including the Canadian Commission for UNESCO's Memory of the World Advisory Committee and the UCLA Library's Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) board. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.