Before joining the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

[6][7] On 13 April 2024, Hobart and William Smith Colleges President Mark Gearan issued a statement announcing that Dean had been "relieved of classroom duties" following an essay she wrote for Verso Books,[8][9][10] in which "she spoke about feeling exhilarated and energized by the paragliders on October 7".

[18] In the first few chapters of her 2012 book The Communist Horizon, Dean surveys the contemporary political landscape, noting the persistence of anti-communist rhetoric more than twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[20][21] First, Dean holds that communism is widely viewed as interchangeable with the Soviet Union, an association that fails to acknowledge the diversity of communist experiments in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, or Latin America are often given little attention.

Second, Dean asserts that the seventy-year history of the Soviet Union is condensed to the twenty-six years of Joseph Stalin's rule.