IAN MILLIGANFRHistS

Historian of the Digital Age

Author of Averting the Digital Dark Age (JHU Press, 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).

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.