Dr. Suzanna Krivulskaya received her Ph.D. in History from the University in Notre Dame. She holds an M.A. in Religion with a concentration in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale Divinity School and a B.A. in Theology from LCC International University.

Dr. Krivulskaya specializes in modern U.S. history and studies the relationship between sexuality and religion. Her first book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, is titled Disgraced: How Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism. The book traces the relationship between scandal and religion in the United States.

Her academic work has been published in the Journal of American Studies, Current Research in Digital History, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and Religion and American Culture. Examples of public-facing scholarship can be found in The Revealer, Religion & Politics, and on the Classical Ideas Podcast.

Dr. Krivulskaya is the recipient of the 2019-2020 LGBTQ Religious History Award from the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. She was selected as the the 2022-2023 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) Fellow in Religion and LGBTQ Rights and the 2023-2025 cohort member of the Young Scholars of American Religion Program at the Center for the Study of American Religion and Culture.

At CSUSM, Dr. Krivulskaya teaches courses in U.S. and digital history. To learn more, visit her website.

Ph.D., History, University of Notre Dame
M.A., History, University of Notre Dame
M.A., Religion, Yale Divinity School
​B.A., Theology, LCC International University

Professor Krivulskaya's current book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, tracks the trajectory of press coverage of Protestant sex scandals. What cultural work has scandal performed in the United States? What demands has the public made of church bodies in response to the revelations of pastoral misdeeds? And how has religion itself changed in the process?

At first hesitant to report on sex crimes in order to protect the reputation of Protestant ministers, U.S. newspapers embraced the genre of scandal in the 1870s, when the biggest celebrity pastor of the era stood trial for adultery. Scandal reporting escalated in the following decades, creating multiple publicity crises, the likes of which continue to plague Protestant churches to this day. Krivulskaya's work demonstrates how scandal allowed the press to compete with the pulpit as a source of moral authority, forced denominations to restructure, and emboldened public scrutiny of religious piety.

Undergraduate

U.S. History 1500-1877
Historical Methods and Writing
Religion in the United States
Women in the United States
U.S. LGBTQ+ History

Graduate

History and Applied New Media Technology
History Teaching Practicum