Scholar,
storyteller, maker
Dr. Madhunika Suresh Mueller (she/they) is an emerging scholar and proudly identifies as a Queer Transnational Scholar, specializing in higher education policy, international student success, and Queer transnational feminist research. As a critical qualitative scholar trained in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, her work examines how systems of power, identity, and belonging intersect within higher education , and how higher education can be reimagined as a site of justice, creativity, and care.
Grounded in de/colonizing, contemplative, and arts-based methodologies, she advances institutional responsibility, narrative repair, and creative pathways to educational equity. Her scholarship is guided by collaborative, community-accountable approaches that honor diverse knowledge traditions.
An Indian citizen born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, educated in an Indian CBSE school run by the Indian embassy, and later moving to Oklahoma for her undergraduate and graduate studies before settling in New York City, Dr. Mueller has spent her life navigating multiple worlds at once. That lived experience is not separate from her scholarship; it is its source.
Outside her academic work, she paints, sketches, sculpts, sews, tends to her plants, and watches good TV. She loves cooking: experimenting with new recipes, going on food crawls, and hosting the occasional dance party with her cat Luna. She is also an avid reader, with a special shoutout to Romantasy authors who have her whole heart. She also considers herself a genuinely funny person, a claim she stands by firmly and without hesitation. Her friends' ongoing insistence that her humor borders on awkward is, she maintains, simply a failure of their taste. A very Zillennial thing to say, and she owns it completely.
