Brian Hochman is Hubert J. Cloke Director of American Studies and Professor of American Studies and English at Georgetown University.

He is the author of two books. The most recent, The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2022), traces the history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The research for this project received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Program and the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center, and it was named one of Publisher’s Weekly’s 20 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 and PopMatters Best Books of 2022. In 2023, The Listeners was awarded the Surveillance Studies Network Book Prize. His first book, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize in 2015.

His academic writings have appeared in American Literature, African American Review, Callaloo, Notes and Queries, Post45: Peer Reviewed, Resilience, and The Multilingual Screen: New Perspectives on Cinema and Linguistic Difference (Bloomsbury, 2016). His research on electronic surveillance has been featured in IEEE Spectrum Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Wired among other venues. He is currently working with the policy analyst and historian Matthew Guariglia on a 50th anniversary edition of The Church Committee Report (W.W. Norton & Co., forthcoming).

He received his PhD from Harvard University’s Program in the History of American Civilization (now American Studies). At Georgetown, he teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literary and cultural history, science and technology studies, surveillance studies, and the history of audiovisual media.

contact: brian.hochman@georgetown.edu