Ian Milligan

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, Religion, Culture and Spirituality, and Sociology and 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 and 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 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.

You can read his full CV or learn more about him by visiting his personal webpage.