Sylvester Johnson is assistant vice provost for the humanities and director of the Center for Humanities at Virginia Tech. Johnson is a founding coeditor of the Journal of Africana Religions. He has authored African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). He also coedited The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security Before and After 9/11 (University of California, 2017).