Professor Brian Hochman

Brian Hochman, Director of American Studies, Professor, English

Brian Hochman’s interests in American Studies and U.S. cultural history span a wide range of fields: 19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture; race and ethnicity; film and visual studies; comparative media studies and media theory; and the history of communications.  

He is the author of Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), which was named as a finalist for the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Prize for Best First Book in 2015. His current book project, The Shadow Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States, is under contract with Harvard University Press and funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship (2017-2018) and a Library of Congress Kluge Fellowship (2018-2019). His academic writings have appeared or are forthcoming 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), and his research on electronic surveillance has been featured in History, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Washington Post, among other public venues.

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. literature and culture, and he serves as Director of the College’s Program in American Studies.