Ian Milligan

Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight and Analysis; Professor

Ian Milligan is Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight and Analysis in the University of Waterloo's Office of Research. In his service role, Milligan provides campus leadership for research oversight and compliance, as well as helps to coordinate data management strategies and bibliometrics.

Milligan’s primary research focus is on how historians can use web archives, as well as the impact of digital sources on historical practice more generally. He is author of three sole-authored books: The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age (2022), History in the Age of Abundance (2019), and Rebel Youth (2014). Milligan also co-authored Exploring Big Historical Data (2015, with Shawn Graham and Scott Weingart) and edited the SAGE Handbook of Web History (2018, with Niels Brügger). Milligan is principal investigator of the Archives Unleashed project.

In 2016, he was awarded the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities Outstanding Early Career Award and in 2019 he received the Arts Excellence in Research award from the University of Waterloo. In 2020, recognizing his track record of research and advocacy, the Association of Canadian Archivists awarded Milligan the Honourary Archivist Award. Finally, in 2022 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Since 2013, Milligan has been principal investigator of over $2.3 million in grant award funding, primarily dedicated to building sustainable research infrastructure.

Milligan is currently co-editor of Internet Histories and was a co-program chair of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. He has an extensive interdisciplinary service record, sitting on selection committees for multiple granting agencies as well as sitting on the steering committee for the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. At Waterloo, Milligan has served both on the University Senate and the Board of Governors. More broadly, Milligan has served on advisory boards or committees with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, Library and Archives Canada, Library of Congress, and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO.

He lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada with his partner, son, and daughter.

You can read his full CV here, or his website here.