Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Studies
Education
- M.S., Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
- B.A., University of Southern California
Biography
Sushma Subramanian is a journalist whose research focuses on how science can explain phenomena that we face day to day. She has written on topics ranging from the impacts of a touch-averse culture, to restoring balance in older adults, to the impact of 50-50 coparenting mandates following separation and divorce.
Her research has taken her from rural China, to the Amazon rainforest, to renowned laboratories around the country and world.
Her favorite course to teach is Magazine Journalism, which celebrates the type of work that allows journalists to delve deeply into their subjects and write about the material they collect using the techniques of fiction.
Book
How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch
Columbia University Press, 2021.
Articles
- “My Furniture Designer-Dealer Is the Unsung Hero of My Renovation,” Dwell, April 2024
- “The Right to Beauty,” The New York Times, July 15, 2023,
- “How Breast Milk Banks could Avert the Next Formula Crisis,” National Geographic, Jan. 30, 2023
- “She Pioneered the Sale of Breast Milk,” Then Lost Everything, The Washington Post Magazine, May 2022
- “Who Gets The Child?” The Washington Post Magazine, Jan. 2022
- “US Cities are Suffocating in the Heat. Now They Want Retribution,” The Guardian, June 2021
- “How Psychologists Can Help Treat Chronic Pain,” The New York Times, Nov. 19, 2021
- “Your Husband Cheated. Should You Be Able to Sue His Mistress?” Elle, Feb. 2021
Helix Center, Spring 2024
Discussion Panelist on “Touch as the Ur-Sense: From Presence to Poesy”
Harvard Divinity School, Fall 2024
Guest lecture on writing about religion and freelancing
Mary Talk Lecture, Fall 2022
“How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch”
JOUR 200: News Journalism
An introduction to the techniques of newsgathering, including practice in news judgement, interviewing, and writing various kinds of news stories.
JOUR 300: Investigative Journalism
Practice using more advanced reporting techniques, such as using public documents and analyzing data to tell news stories.
JOUR 301: Magazine Journalism
Practice reporting and writing long-form magazine stories incorporating multimedia for online audiences.
JOUR 380: Practicum in Journalism
Practice writing, taking photos, editing stories and other activities for the University of Mary Washington’s student newspaper, an experience that will help students learn the principles of sound journalism and how news helps to form community.