Johnny E. Williams is the author of African-American Religion and the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas (University Press of Mississippi 2003) and Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics (Lexington Books 2016). The former book examines the role of religious culture in motivating civil rights protest among African-Americans while the latter investigates the  complex role racialized culture plays in delimiting how genome researchers think about human genetic variation. He is the author of  numerous articles examining culture’s role in politics, social movement mobilization and scientific knowledge production.