Rate My Professor John Dinan

John Dinan is Professor and Department Chair of the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. He earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia in 1990, an M.A. in 1994, and a Ph.D. in 1996 from the same institution. Dinan joined the Wake Forest faculty in 2001, advancing to full professor and assuming the role of department chair. His research focuses on state constitutionalism, federalism, and American political development. Dinan's areas of expertise encompass federalism, state constitutionalism, state politics, and American political development.

Dinan authored State Constitutional Politics: Governing by Amendment in the American States (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and The American State Constitutional Tradition (University Press of Kansas, 2006). He contributes an annual entry on state constitutional developments to The Book of the States. His peer-reviewed publications include The Constitutional Politics of Abortion Policy After Dobbs: State Courts, Constitutions, and Lawmaking in the Montana Law Review (2023), Explaining the Prevalence of State Constitutional Conventions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in the Journal of Policy History (2022), and The Roots of Direct Democracy in the United States: South Dakota's 1898 Referendum Creating the First Statewide Initiative Process in State Politics & Policy Quarterly (2024). Dinan serves as editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism and previously chaired the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Section of the American Political Science Association. Through these contributions, he has advanced scholarship on state constitutional change and intergovernmental relations.