My name is Suzanne van Geuns and I am an Anna Julia Cooper Fellow (2025-2026) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where I will begin as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in fall 2026. Before joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion. My research interests are in American religion and artificial intelligence, with a focus on sexual ethics. I am passionate about public scholarship and have a particular interest in editing that allows academic research to gain traction in wider conversations.

My book, Seductive Methods: Sexual Success in the Computational Imagination, is a genealogy of misogynist frustration and an inquiry into our shared computational condition. It is also a history of seduction forums, which are online domains that begin from the assumption that sex with women, or indeed success more broadly, is an achievement born of men’s methodological expertise. Across the forty-year archive this book assembles, from scattered bulletin board systems in the 1980s to consolidated social media platforms in the 2010s, seduction forums envisioned a path toward success that is distinctly computational: systems, loops, and algorithms are integral to the methods they espouse. When users imagine themselves improving their social intelligence, they reach for the language and logics of artificial intelligence. Seductive Methods follows this computational imagination as it structures increasingly violent misogyny on computer networks, from the successes envisioned by methodical virtuosos who call themselves “seduction gurus” to the growing number of mass shootings perpetrated by “involuntary celibates” certain that no method will work for them. Drawing the study of religion, gender studies, and the history of computing together in a new analytic of methodological form, Seductive Methods presents ways to think about the intimate power that the computational imagination now exerts over hope, desire, and its frustration. My book is under contract with the University of Chicago Press and will appear in its Class 200 series.

Before I came to Princeton, I was a graduate student in the University of Toronto’s Department for the Study of Religion, and before Toronto, I studied literature at Utrecht University. While at the University of Toronto, I was a Graduate Fellow in the Ethics of AI Lab and at the Schwarz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. In 2018, I spent a term as a Recognised Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. At Princeton, I developed the Does Not Compute toolkit for online historical research, in response to the questions about method – “how did you find this?” – that often followed my presentations. While my focus is on Seductive Methods for the foreseeable future, I am growing excited about a second project focused on fate and/as predictability in the history of online dating and in romance novels.

I can be reached at vangeuns AT wisc.edu