Susana M. Muñoz

Associate Professor, program coordinator, and co-director, Colorado State University

Susana M. Muñoz is an associate professor of higher education, a program coordinator of the Higher Education Leadership (HEL) program, and co-director of CSU initiatives for the Race and Intersectional Studies for Educational Equity (RISE) Center in the School of Education at Colorado State University (CSU). Her scholarly interests center on the experiences of minoritized populations in higher education. Specifically, she focuses her research on issues of equity, identity, and campus climate for undocumented Latinx students, while employing perspectives such as legal violence, racist nativism, and Chicana feminist epistemology to identify and deconstruct issues of power and inequities as experienced by these populations. She utilizes multiple research methods as mechanisms to examine these matters with the ultimate goal of informing immigration policy and higher education practices. Her first book, Identity, Social Activism, and the Pursuit of Higher Education: The Journey Stories of Undocumented and Unafraid Community Activists (Peter Lang Publishing), highlights the lives of 13 activists who grapple with their legality as a salient identity.

Dr. Muñoz has been honored by the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics for her teaching and research; she was also recognized as a Salzburg Global Fellow and named one of the “top 25 most influential women in higher education” by Diverse Issues in Higher Education magazine.