Nouvelles Nouvelles Podcast 19: Nicholas Hoffman on Alt-ac Career

Interviewer: Di Wang and Natalie Cline

Audio edited by Di Wang

Background music: Pierre-Francisque Caroubel's Galliard, performed by the Early Interval Ensemble (Thanks Early Interval Ensemble for permission to use this recording!)

Time: February 13, 2026

Di:

My name is Di Wang. I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of History and a Graduate Research Associate for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies here at the Ohio State University. I'm here with Natalie Cline, an undergraduate student majoring in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Italian Studies. We are joined today by our The OSU alumnus, Dr. Nick Hoffman.  

Dr. Nick Hoffman is a Senior Strategic Communications Officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA. After receiving his PhD in English from the Ohio State University, he began work at DIA's National Digital Exploitation and OSINT Center, NDOC, in 2022. He has received the DIA Director's Team Award, a Director of National Intelligence Meritorious Team Citation, and an official commendation from the United Kingdom's Chief of Defense Intelligence. Dr. Hoffman, welcome back to the OSU, and thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Hoffman: 

Thank you so much. It's really great to meet you, Di and Natalie, and it's really great to be back here. You know, I haven't been in Hagerty Hall for, I think, three years now, but it feels like exactly the same. It's great, and thank you for the introduction. It's really kind of you. I've been trying to keep busy, but a lot of those awards are from being in the right place at the right time, wandering into rooms, and being part of projects. No, it's great. I will preface, say, you know, I'm here as an alumnus. I'm here to engage academically and share some of my work. So, you know, none of what I'm talking about is, you know, official stance of DIA or the federal government or anything like that. So we can just have a chat and just talk MedRen nerds to MedRen nerds.

Natalie: 

Well, I guess I can start with our first question. Could you tell us a bit more about your work here as a PhD student in the English department and how you transitioned into your current position after graduation. 

Dr. Hoffman: 

Sure, I'd love to. So I entered as an early medievalist, so I focused in Old English and Old Norse. And, you know, I came into my PhD thinking it would be about focus, focus, focus, right? You come in and, you know, that's the mentality we have about PhDs where you're going to find a topic and then you're going to whittle it down, and you're going to whittle it down more, and then you're going to become the world expert on the smallest possible thing, right? And write a dissertation on it.  My experience was the opposite at OSU. I just kept broadening. I ended up doing more later medieval stuff. There's even a chapter of my dissertation about Emily Dickinson. So I actually used the PhD to explore a lot and to broaden. And I think it was the environment here that allowed that, you know, really, really welcoming faculty where I could just meet new people and ask questions and learn new things. And it also kind of, you know, seeped into other parts of my brain. And I started to think, you know, well, maybe I can think more broadly about my career. And that's exactly what I did.   

So as I was doing my PhD, I was learning more about intelligence and working in national security. It was something that I thought about in childhood. And I was like, maybe this isn't totally crazy to do, right? So I learned really, because I'm not an international studies major, I didn't do national security courses or courses on intelligence analysis. I really was just kept doing what I loved, which was medieval literature, and then applying for internships at the same time.  

So, I learned a lot just by applying. And it's really interesting, as I develop my application, you know, I got lots of rejections over a couple years, I got a couple interviews, and the interviews didn't go well, because they were my first ever interviews, I'd just been in academia the whole time. And I found actually, over time that my earlier applications, I was trying to almost hide the fact that I did medieval studies or try to translate it into something different. But later on, I just kind of leaned into it, right? And I sort of fashioned myself as like, no, I am a medievalist, which means I'm good at writing, I'm good at researching, I've got a talent for identifying important tidbits and context, when presented with really complex documents and complex histories. And I can learn languages, and I can connect the dots, historically. I mean, this is stuff we all do, right, as medieval and Renaissance students.  

And it turns out that was one of the reasons why I was recruited at DIA, which is really fascinating. I actually met my recruiter when I was doing orientation. This person comes up, and they're like, hey, you're Nick. And I was like, yes, who are you? And they're like, oh, I was a person that read your application. And you would not believe this, they told me, you know, they see so many applications, and they're like, I saw that you could read Old English. And they told me how when they were in college, they took an Old English course, like a Beowulf course, in translation, but they saw some of the Old English, and they were just so impressed that somebody would still dedicate the time to learning Old English, as challenging as it is, and actually moved my application up to higher on the pile, and made them look at it twice.

So yeah, right? So, it was like, it's not, I was so worried in the early application stages, where it's like, I need to fashion myself as like this, you know, no nonsense person who can write about national security topics, like, and I have all this geopolitical knowledge. And it's like, no, what really got me through the door was my authenticity and studying something a lot of people don't know about and being passionate about it. So that was really encouraging. That's how I ended up there. Became an intern, finished my PhD, and then got a job offer afterward. 

Natalie: 

That's a direct payoff. 

Dr. Hoffman: 

Yeah, exactly. So, thank you, Beowulf poet. We don't know, still.

Di: 

Yeah, that's a good reminder for our PhD students who are struggling with job search and everything.

Dr. Hoffman: 

Lean into it. Don't, yeah, don't try to apologize for being a medievalist right through, you know, or a Renaissance, or any pre-modernist. Don't apologize for it as you walk through the door. And don't approach it from this perspective of, oh, I need to kind of justify what I did. No, like, lean into it, I think is the best advice I could give. 

Natalie: 

That's really good to hear, because I think lately, it's a lot of kind of the opposite. So it's good to hear that, you know, be proud.

Di: 

Our second question is more directly about your talk. So what inspired your interest in the Mitrokhin Archive? 

Dr. Hoffman: 

Oh, yeah. So for the talk, yeah. So I'm talking about KGB documents and archives, and the historical context for them, but also what it means to look at them as somebody who studied medieval manuscripts. The talk is really a lot of show and tell. I just, like, pull up a lot of KGB documents. I've found that have been digitized and be like, look at this, this is cool. And, you know, talk about things like, that we talk about a lot as pre-modernists, like marginalia, and signs of use, and provenance, and how just using that vocabulary, you tend to start looking at these documents differently.  

I got interested because every day I walk into my office, and I pass a display case. And in that display case, there is a note card, like an index card about, you know, I don't know what the dimensions are of a standard index card. And it's like a little worn, and it has just a little list of places and names on it, just scribbled. And that note card inspired me to look more into Cold War archives generally, because that note card actually belonged to a DIA officer who died in duty for DIA in the, during the Cold War. So, and I get to see it every day, and it was, like, fascinating that, like, I got to be so close to this material artifact.  So it was about, it belonged to an officer named Nicholas Shadrin. And he was, he was born in the 20s, and he grew up and became, like, a Soviet naval officer. And then in 1959, he actually defected to the West with his wife, Blanka, while he was on assignment in Poland. And since then, he, yeah, he came to the U.S., he testified to Congress, and then he ended up working at DIA in what was called the Handbook Analysis Division, analyzing handbooks, right?   

But that was actually the cover name for what the office he was actually in, which included a bunch of Soviet block defectors and analysts and translators. And they were actually collecting what you were saying in my intro, the open source intelligence. They were collecting that for trends and indicators, and they actually produced, like, this weekly report that went to the White House every, this classified weekly report that went to the White House every week. So it was, like, this kind of, you know, dream team of, like, former Soviets and American intelligence personnel, yeah.   

And his story gets really interesting, too, because, and this is, I'll get into why the index card exists. He came to the U.S. and, of course, the KGB was like, we know that guy, it's interesting that he's there now. And they attempted to recruit him. So he ended up being a double agent for about a decade after that. So the KGB approached him, he went back to DIA, started working with the FBI, and he managed to convince the KGB that he was actually recruited back. But he actually the whole time was still working for the American government. So he did it for a decade. I mean, you can't imagine, like, what that type of work is. Like, it's incredible. So the entire time the KGB thought they had an insider at DIA, but in fact, they had somebody who was curating information for them, right? Very interesting.   

And he, sadly, though, at some point was compromised. And his KGB handlers lured him back to Vienna, where he was with his wife at the time. They didn't think anything of the trip. But he got, like, a weird feeling partway through the trip. And that's why he wrote that note card. It was a list of places for his wife, Blanca, to go if anything went wrong. And that evening, he was in Vienna on his way to the Votivkirche, which is like this big, beautiful cathedral. And the KGB attempted to abduct him to bring him to Czechoslovakia and then back to Moscow. But our current understanding, we believe he was likely overdosed accidentally with the sedative they wanted to use to abduct him. So, to this day, like, the Russian government hasn't even acknowledged where he is or where his body is or anything like that. But, and it wasn't until 2019, we could acknowledge him at DIA publicly for his service.   

So yeah. So, I got to pass that every day and see the note card, right? And it's like, just see, like, his handwriting and how fast it was scribbled and see how it was faded a little bit with time. But also, there's no creases in it either, which shows that, like, his wife had kept it for, like, 30 years, like, in her purse and, like, kept it perfectly folded after everything that happened. And it's just this. So that's what got me interested in these Soviet archives, not as, you know, I was interested to find more material that showed not just the geopolitical history of these, you know, these big spy wars during the Cold War, but the human history of it, right? And I still believe there's a lot of human history available in this ephemera and these little notes. And that's just, yeah, I was just really taken with it. So that's what got me interested in the topic. 

Natalie: 

Wow. That's amazing. And I can see the connection to the research that's done with early modern and, like, medieval, like, really finding the human elements in these documents. 

Dr. Hoffman: 

Yeah. Making them speak in a way, right?

Natalie: 

Yes. Absolutely.

Dr. Hoffman: 

It's something I haven't lost even though I've left, you know, medieval studies and academia. I still have, I still look at things that way, right? 

Natalie: 

Absolutely. Do you think that's a skill that you learned, like, through the medieval studies? 

Dr. Hoffman: 

Yes. I think as medievalists and Renaissance folks, we are so good at, we are context masters, right? We can have something put in front of us, a document, a piece of media, anything. And one thing we learned to be really good at is to figure out the who, what, where, when, why, and find small details that other people might overlook, but that we find very significant that tells the story of the document we're looking at. I think that's such an incredible talent. Um, and it's something that also drew me to intelligence too. It's about context hunting and following leads and that detective work of connecting the dots and experimenting, finding what's significant, what's not significant. I mean, it's, it's mentally rigorous and challenging.  

I think one of your future, like the questions you wanted to talk about today too was, do people ever give me pushback or have doubts about, being, former MedRen and doing this type of work now? And I'd say no, because MedRen is good scholarship, right? It's good methodology. And sometimes people are surprised, but I've actually never, even in my current job, no one's ever been like, oh, like, why is that guy here? People are more like curious, like, oh, tell me how you applied it. 

Natalie:

Are there any areas of future research that you find particularly exciting in your field? 

Dr. Hoffman: 

Yeah. So, right now, like I'm really happy to be back here because I'm actually workshopping some of this material. I'm not entirely sure where I want to go with it yet, whether I want to write an article, um, on this particular subject or, uh, whether or not I want to shift to other archives that might be a little more intact. You know, I have a colleague who's at Princeton who knows a lot about more about the Stasi archives, right? Which were obviously linked with the KGB and they're more complete and more accessible. But I'm also still considering going further back. I'm also considering taking this as a mental exercise and then diving into medieval texts again and trying to parse what intelligence looks like in the middle ages. 

Of course, there's been plenty of scholarship written about it.  But again, this might be, you know, right now I'm trying to bring the medieval forward in a way that's creative and interesting. And maybe I can take the fact that I'm an intelligence officer now, bring it backward in a way that's creative and interesting and add to the conversation. So I'm still considering all these different routes. I'm limited in terms of some of the material I'm presenting on tomorrow because, you know, I can't just, I can't fly to Moscow and ask to look at the archives, right? But there might be other people who work in this space who do do those things and can take it and run with it in ways. So yeah, interested to see how the Q&A goes, what directions I can take this in. And also interested to hear other people's ideas who are working in different academic spaces who might see this and think, oh, I might be able to approach boring paperwork in an exciting way.

Natalie: 

So, your current position, you have that kind of flexibility to choose where you go with it? 

Dr. Hoffman: 

Yeah, I think work has been very supportive of my independent academic pursuits. And in many ways, it intersects with where I work now. So my office right now is in charge of open source intelligence, but also what we call document and media exploitation. So my office will take in foreign documents, right? And do the forensic analysis on them, right? So we get to do, it does intersect, right? So I'm kind of surrounded in an environment where we're looking at media all the time and thinking very critically about media. And then, so it's natural that it's like, oh yeah, now you want to pursue your scholarship that's also about media. Makes sense, you know? There's a reason why we hired you. So yeah, so I think I'm excited to see where things go, but also it's scholarship on top of a full-time job. It's going to take longer than if, you know, I was being paid to do independent research. 

Di:

Thanks so much, Dr. Hoffman. I'm Di Wang. I have been here with Natalie Cline, my fellow the OSU student, interviewing our the OSU alumnus, Dr. Nick Hoffman. We are looking forward to our talk tomorrow. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Dr. Hoffman: 

Thank you for having me. This is great.