Madonna studies (also variously called Madonna scholarship, Madonna-ology, the Madonna phenomenon, and Madonnathinking) refers to the academic study of the work and life of the American singer-songwriter Madonna. The terms refer to any such studies, but in particular to those using an interdisciplinary approach incorporating cultural and media studies in a postmodern approach that began in the mid-1980s. Authors of these studies are sometimes called "Madonna scholars" or "Madonnologists"; E. Ann Kaplan and John Fiske are early examples. After Madonna's debut in 1983 and quick rise to stardom, the practice soon appeared, achieving its peak in the next decade. The academic attention has continued since.

These studies have especially treated of gender, feminism, race, multiculturalism, sexuality, and the mass media on the basis of Madonna's songs, videos, live performances, films, books, and interviews. The scholarship has stimulated increased academic examination of pop music and its performers and more broadly of popular entertainment, shaping American cultural studies, although public authorities such as the National Geographic Society have deemed it controversial. One early scholar of Madonna studies, the feminist writer Camille Paglia, criticized the field (along with popular culture studies more broadly) for its perceived "ill effect on students and an increasingly corrupt career system" in academia.

The field is commonly called Madonna studies, a phrase that appeared in the late 1980s, according to the writer Maura Johnston. Although some academics (such as David Gauntlett) called it that, others (including Janice Radway, Suzanna Danuta Walters, and Maureen Orth) instead called it Madonna-ology (or Madonnaology), others yet called it Madonna scholarship, another (E. Ann Kaplan) called it the Madonna Phenomenon, and some critics (such as Robert Christgau) called it Madonnathinking (or Madonnathink).

The wealth of academic scrutiny of Madonna and her influence created what some journalists and scholars (including Simon Frith, Michael Bérubé and Jon Pareles) disdainfully labeled the "Madonna industry," "Madonna business," and "Madonna boom."

Chilean literary critic Óscar Contardo [es] places the Madonna studies in the context of the British cultural studies when the phenomenon of celebrities began to be analyzed from the 1970s. American historian Richard Wolin observed that the cultural studies approach expanded during the 1980s, adding that under the influence of Michel Foucault, as well as Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, popular culture came to be viewed as a site of "resistance to power". It was in this context, Wolin argues, that the "Madonna studies" developed into an academic cottage industry.

In Madonna: A Biography (2007), Mary Cross argues that "the turmoil of new theory imported from Europe and the culture wars of ideology were bringing huge changes to the American academic world and the college curriculum". She notes that whole departments devoted to popular culture, women's studies and media studies emerged, and suggested that Madonna seemed to "illustrate extremely" well what was happening on the "embattled cultural ramparts" of late twentieth-century American, describing her as a "perfect example of the whole theory of postmodernism the academic world was suddenly so immersed in". Daniel Harries from The Nation similarly observed in 1992, that reflections of contemporary attitudes were occurring in the perception of popular art, not only among academics but also among mainstream pop critics.

In addition, literary scholar Luis Cárcamo-Huechante from Harvard University traces the origins of the Madonna studies to the camp sensibility associated with Susan Sontag's 1960s works referring to a "fascination of artifice and exaggeration", and what he perceives Madonna illustrated well. Associate professor Diane Pecknold in American Icons (2006) also discusses the camp sensibility adding that for most of the twentieth century, American scholars subscribed to the idea of an objective and universal canon and academics "were applying to Madonna the same sophisticated textual readings".

D Magazine talked about the Madonna scholarship in 1986. Robert Miklitsch, associate professor of Ohio University dates the start of Madonna studies to 1987 and Rocking Around The Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism & Consumer Culture by E. Ann Kaplan. According to Jon Pareles of The New York Times, Madonna was deemed "as a vehicle to open up issues". Pecknold also observed that her person was open to multiple interpretations, contributing to the rise of the Madonna studies.