Wallace Best specializes in 19th and 20th century African American religious history. His research and teaching focus on the areas of African American religion, religion and literature, Pentecostalism, and Womanist theology. He has held fellowships at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

He is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952, Princeton University Press and Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem, New York University Press. He is currently at work on a book entitled The Spiritual Capital of Black America: Twentieth Century Harlem’s World of Religion and Churches.