Stephanie Frank

My scholarly training is in the history of religions; my projects center on secularization theory and political theology. My dissertation, completed at the University of Chicago under Bruce Lincoln, examined how the endeavor to construct a secular social theory was shaped, at its foundations, by the theological problems it purported to leave behind — tracing how the Durkheimian school's attempt to build a science of society free from religious premises remained structurally indebted to the very tradition it claimed to have superseded. Running alongside that project was a parallel line of research in intellectual history, asking how modern political concepts — sovereignty, representation, the general will — are secular translations of theological arguments.

When I analyze AI and its discourse, I apply the same sort of analysis that I have applied elsewhere — asking what it has inherited, what it has suppressed, and what work it is doing in the name of what it claims to have left behind.

After my Ph.D., I spent thirteen years as the sole faculty member in religious studies at Columbia College Chicago, an urban arts-and-media school. I designed the curriculum, made the case for why the study of religion belongs in a 21st-century art school, and taught "Religion and Violence," "Religion and Gender," and "Religion in U.S. Law and Politics" (among other things) to thousands of students who had never taken a religion class before.

The institutional experience of building a humanities curriculum tailored to a particular group of students and then watching it systematically devalued is inseparable from my current work on AI and higher education. I'm writing from beneath the wreckage of a specific argument about what education is for.

The same method I developed for understanding secularization — tracing what persists beneath the threshold of official disavowal — is what I'm now applying to AI discourse. It is another case in which people are making claims about a break with the past while remaining indebted to the very thing they claim to have left behind.