Congratulations to Suzanne van Geuns for winning the American Religion journal dissertation prize for 2023! Suzanne is a 2022 DSR PhD alumna, and her dissertation, "Seductive Methods: Sexual Success in the Computational Imagination,” was supervised by Pamela Klassen, with committee members Simon Coleman and J. Barton Scott. Examining figures ranging from “seduction gurus” to incels in their online habitats, it theorizes a computational imagination and its hold over intimacy, hope, and desire. Suzanne says on X, “So happy about this, especially after years of everyone looking worried whenever I said I am getting a religion PhD and it involves six years of researching pick-up lines.”
In related news, Suzanne, now a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion at Princeton University, just launched her new website, called “Does Not Compute: Religion, Sexual Ethics, and the Age of Computation,” a toolkit for those who want to do historical internet-based archival research. Congratulations, Suzanne, on both these accomplishments!
In 2021, Suzanne was a graduate fellow at the University of Toronto's Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (read the Q&A here). Currently, she is a postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton Center for Culture, Society and Religion, where she is working on the creation of a methodological toolkit to help graduate students and faculty apply their expertise to social debates about internet culture and infrastructure.