  We study the response of the Sakai-Sugimoto holographic model of large N_c
QCD at nonzero temperature to external electric and magnetic fields. In the
electric case we find a first-order insulator-conductor transition in both the
confining and deconfining phases of the model. In the deconfining phase the
conductor is described by the parallel 8-brane-anti-8-brane embedding with a
current of quarks and anti-quarks. We compute the conductivity and show that it
agrees precisely with a computation using the Kubo formula. In the confining
phase we propose a new kind of 8-brane embedding, corresponding to a baryonic
conductor. In the magnetic field case we show that the critical temperature for
chiral-symmetry restoration in the deconfined phase increases with the field
and approaches a finite value in the limit of an infinite magnetic field. We
also illustrate the nonlinear behavior of the electric and magnetic
susceptibilities in the different phases.
