Sylvester A. Johnson is Professor of Black Studies at Northwestern University. He was appointed to hold the 2024 Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress’s Kluge Center. As a scholar of race, religion, and technology, Johnson works at the intersection of technical and humanistic stakeholders to advance more democratic, inclusive outcomes for an innovation-driven society. His research has examined religion, race, and empire in the Atlantic world; religion and sexuality; national security practices; and the impact of intelligent machines and human enhancement on human identity and systems of racial domination.

Johnson is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Africana Religions. He has authored two books: African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015 and a winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award, and The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2004, which garnered the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book Award. He also co-edited, with Steven Weitzman, The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11, published by University of California Press in 2017.