Reenu received her B.A. degree in English from Stella Maris College (affiliated to the University of Madras) in 2005, her M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of York (U.K) in 2007 and her PhD in Linguistics from Newcastle University (U.K) in 2011. She taught briefly in the Linguistics department at the Central University of Kerala in the 2013-2014 academic year. She was awarded a three year UGC Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2015, the Dr. S. Radhakrishnan Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences (including languages), which she took up at the Centre for Linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.