Iain Boal is a social historian affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley, and Birkbeck, University of London. In 2005-6 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Science and Technology. Having a particular interest in environmental history, he has studied the ebb and flow of the fishing industries in California and Cornwall. He is co-director of MayDay Rooms, an ‘archiving from below’ project which aims to salvage and to animate threatened historical materials with a view to creating the conditions for an ample life in common.