Professor Sylvester A. Johnson, the founding director of the Virginia Tech Center for Humanities,  is  a nationally recognized humanities scholar of religion and US culture, and a public intellectual, specializing in the study of technology, race, religion, and national security. He is also assistant vice provost for the humanities at Virginia Tech. Professor Johnson’s graduate degrees from Union Theological Seminary, New York City (1997, 2000, 2002) are in Systematic Theology/ Contemporary Religious Thought, a discipline that is centered on the study of doctrinal traditions (currently Christian) viewed historically, with the goal of relating those traditions to the theology of contemporary Christian doctrines. 

Johnson, who holds a faculty appointment in Virginia Tech’s Department of Religion and Culture, has authored The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity, 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, an award-winning interpretation of five centuries of democracy, colonialism, and freedom in the Atlantic world. He has published more than 70 scholarly articles, essays, and reviews. Professor Johnson’s list of invited talks is very long and equally impressive in its breadth, ranging from presentations in a scholarly setting to talks at many churches of differing denominations, including, for example “Religion and Politics in American History.”