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 currently 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 the School of Social, Political, and Historical Research at the University of Waterloo, a four-year appointment beginning in July 2026. Created through a Faculty of Arts reorganization into six schools, it brings together seven departments — Anthropology, Classical Studies, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Sociology & Legal Studies — with a mandate to advance interdisciplinary research and teaching while respecting the distinct strengths of each discipline. He previously served as Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight & Integrity, providing campus-wide leadership across research ethics, compliance, safeguarding, and research data management. 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).

He is currently at work on “On Every Screen” (working title), a new history of the September 11th attacks told through the early internet. Drawing on born-digital sources that scholarship has largely left untouched — pager messages, listserv posts, Flash games, memorial websites, and the edit histories of Wikipedia — it reconstructs how millions of ordinary people made sense of the attacks in real time, building solidarity and spreading conspiracy, mourning and mythologizing through the same networks.

Leadership & Service

As inaugural Director of the School of Social, Political, and Historical Research, Milligan leads a new interdisciplinary school created through the Faculty of Arts' reorganization into six schools. Appointed to a four-year term beginning in July 2026, he brings together seven departments — Anthropology, Classical Studies, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Sociology & Legal Studies — with a mandate to strengthen interdisciplinary research and teaching while respecting each department's disciplinary strengths.

He previously served as Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight & Integrity, leading campus-wide research integrity and compliance — including the Office of Research Ethics, safeguarding research, research health & safety, bibliometrics, emergency research issues, and campus research awards — and co-led the university's Research Data Management strategy through to 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.