The Religious Studies Program is delighted to introduce our newest Core Faculty member, Dr. Suzanne van Geuns! This year she holds an Anna Julia Cooper Fellowship and will join the Program as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies starting in Fall 2026. Get to know her a little bit better in the interview below:
Q: Briefly introduce yourself. Where were you before coming to UW-Madison and what do you work on?
A: My name is Suzanne van Geuns and I work on artificial intelligence, sexual ethics, and religion. I’m especially interested in how people use AI to imagine themselves more successful and happy; the book I’m writing focuses on feedback loops, algorithms, and datafied metrics in online seduction advice, for example. Before joining the Religious Studies department at UW, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, where I focused on public scholarship.
Q: What do you find exciting about Religious Studies as a field?
A: So much to say here! What immediately comes to mind for me is our training in letting real, substantive differences between people exist without minimizing them or explaining them away. At our best, this makes us thoughtful, careful listeners in addition to being sharp critical/historical thinkers, and that is why I think the university could use more Religious Studies students and scholars in every room.
Q: What are you most looking forward to about living in Madison?
A: I have so much yet to see in Madison (I first saw it in a snowstorm!), but I am especially looking forward to walking along the Lakeshore Path. When I flew in, I saw the two lakes from the air and it looked spectacular. I’m also very keen to explore the farmer’s markets—Madison seems a good place if you’re a treat-motivated person and I definitely am.
Q: Can you give us a sneak preview of what classes you’ll be teaching next year?
A: When I visited UW this winter, the students in my “teaching demonstration” taught me about aura. It was a very relevant concept for a job interview, but it also got me thinking about an intro course to religion and technology organized around aura; we would think about public versus “true” faces, authenticity and presence, and technology as a way to reveal or hide ourselves from each other. Other courses I’d love to bring to UW include religion and artificial intelligence as well as religion and online dating.
Q: What has been your favorite Religious Studies book (or article) that you’ve read recently and why?
A: I thought Astrotopia (Mary-Jane Rubenstein) was super cool. It’s about the billionaire thirst for space exploration, and it really demonstrates that scholars of religion have a uniquely useful perspective on the dream that technology will bring us to a better world. Let me also take this opportunity to plug Barbara Sostaita’s Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert, which is a beautiful and thoughtful take on the idea of sanctuary and what it means to care for one another in hard times.