Adrian Dominic Sinclair Johns (born 19 October 1965) is a British-born academic. He earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1992. He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2001, and was appointed the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012.
Johns is best known for his works on the history of information, particularly The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making and Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.
Johns met Alison Winter at Cambridge in 1987, and the two married in 1992. She died in 2016.
In 2002, Johns was involved in a debate with Elizabeth Eisenstein in the American Historical Review over the degree to which printing was necessarily an agent of change (which Eisenstein had argued) or, as Johns claimed, a vehicle of change which carried messages that were mostly shaped by outside social forces.