Opening Welcome & Sylvester Johnson Keynote - 2023 ISSRNC Conference
Channel: ISSRNC Religion, Nature, and Culture
Date: 2023-02-25

2023 Conference Opening
Thursday, February 2, 2023

Welcome Remarks 
- Evan Berry, ISSRNC President

Keynote Address
- Sylvester Johnson “Future Humans, [Post]Human Futures: Animism, Human Engineering, and the Life of Things”

Sylvester A. Johnson is Associate Vice Provost for Public Interest Technology and Executive
Director of the “Tech for Humanity” initiative at Virginia Tech. He is the founding director of
Virginia Tech’s Center for Humanities, which is supporting human-centered research and
humanistic approaches to the guidance of technology. Johnson’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 race governance. In addition to co-facilitating a national working group on religion and US
empire, Johnson led an Artificial Intelligence project that developed a successful proof-ofconcept machine learning application to ingest and analyze a humanities text. He is the author
of The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity (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 (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: Critical New Histories (NYU Press 2022). He is a
founding co-editor of the Journal of Africana Religions. He is currently producing a digital
scholarly edition of an early English history of global religions and writing a book on human
identity in an age of intelligent machines and human-machine symbiosis.

After Earth? Religion and Technology on a Changing Planet
International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture Conference

February 2-5, 2023 @ Arizona State University

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