Sylvester Johnson
Professor of Black Studies
- sylvester.johnson@northwestern.edu
- 1860 Campus Drive, Crowe Hall, Room 5-101
Research Interests:
Race
Religion
Technology
About:
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, Sylvester works at the intersection of technical and humanistic stakeholders to advance more democratic, inclusive outcomes for an innovation-driven society.
Sylvester’s 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.
Sylvester is the author of The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (Palgrave 2004), a study of race and religious hatred that won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book award; and African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge 2015), an award-winning interpretation of five centuries of democracy, colonialism, and freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson has also co-edited The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11 (University of California 2017) and Religion and US Empire (NYU Press 2022). He is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Africana Religions. Sylvester is currently writing a study of human identity in an age of intelligent machines and human-machine symbiosis.
He leads the “Future Humans, Human Futures” project, which has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. This project engages the current and emerging challenges for ethical governance of technology by working across multiple societal sectors to cultivate socio-technical knowledge and skills.