Rate My Professor Ian Van Dyke

Ian Van Dyke is a Visiting Professor of History in the History department at Grand Valley State University. He is a historian of the U.S. in the world, with a focus on religion, ideas, and politics in the twentieth century. Van Dyke earned his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2022, with a dissertation titled Evangelical Multiculturalism in the Age of Fracture: U.S. Missionaries and Evangelicals’ Search for Diversity and Social Justice, 1974–2010. He previously received an M.A. from Ohio University in 2016 and a B.A. from Gannon University in 2014. His research interests encompass U.S. in the World; religious and intellectual history; and politics and political thought.

Van Dyke is currently at work on a book on the Lausanne Movement, a sprawling global evangelical Christian missionary organization from the 1970s through the early 2000s. His research explores the ways Global South evangelicals—especially radical thinkers from the Middle East and Latin America—challenged the conservative priorities of their North American peers in an effort to re-think Christian politics along more just, egalitarian, and humane lines. He is also researching a second project on the history of U.S. religious institutions’ reckoning with historical injustices perpetrated in the name of religion, including settler-colonial violence, racism, and cultural imperialism. Van Dyke is co-editor, with Darren Dochuk, of The Routledge History of Evangelical Christianity in America, forthcoming from Routledge Press in 2026. His teaching is broadly situated within U.S. and global histories, ranging from introductory surveys to upper-level courses on American conservatism, religion and social justice, and the global 1960s.