Suzanne van Geuns
Position title: Anna Julia Cooper Fellow (2025-2026), Assistant Professor of Religious Studies (starting 2026)
Email: vangeuns@wisc.edu
Research interests:
American religion, computation, sexual ethics, artificial intelligence, internet history, public scholarship, media theory
Biography:
Suzanne van Geuns works on American religion, sex/dating, and computation. She is currently writing a history of online seduction advice that traces how, why, and to what effect men seeking to improve their social intelligence turn to the language and logics of artificial intelligence. Seductive Methods: Sexual Success in the Computational Imagination will appear in the University of Chicago Press’s Class 200 series. Her next project will focus on fate and predictability in the history of online dating and in romance novels. Before coming to UW, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, where she developed Does Not Compute, a toolkit for doing internet history. Public scholarship is an integral part of her research agenda.
Selected Publications:
| 2025 | “Attraction to the Sequence: The Algorithmic Approach to Success on Seduction Forums.” In American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Four, edited by Candace Lukasik, Joshua Urich, and Michael Altman, p. 9-35. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2025. |
| 2024 | “Rabid for a peace.” Essay for “Ruinations: Violence in these times,” a forum on The Immanent Frame, co-curated by Suzanne van Geuns and Mona Oraby, September 25, 2024. https://tif.ssrc.org/2024/09/25/rabid-for-a-peace/ |
| 2024 | “Peacocking: Religion as ‘Loud Piece’ in Masculinity Influencing.” Part of Fashioning Masculinities, a public-facing journal supplement commissioned by American Religion, 2024. https://www.american-religion.org/fashioning-masculinities/peacock |
| 2023 | “Pipeline ironies: the colonial religious history behind online hate.” In Eaten by the Internet, Meatspace Press, 2023. |
| 2022 | Co-authored, with Pamela Klassen as second author. “Promiscuous Affiliation: Evangelical Women, Biblical Mediation and Digital Infrastructures of Conversion.” In Digital Humanities and Material Religion, edited by Emily Clark and Rachel McBride Lindsey. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. |
| 2022 | “What does it mean to consider religion when thinking about AI?” Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (blog), March 22, 2022. https://srinstitute.utoronto.ca/news/what-does-it-mean-to-consider-religion-and-ai |