Xavier Viktor Brown (he/him/his) is from rural Maryland—a stone’s throw from the Appalachian trail and the Civil War Battlefields that got him interested in history. Xavier earned a BA in Music at the University of Chicago and a Master’s degree in Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Xavier is a 4th year in the PhD program at UCLA and in addition to studying with his adviser, Mitchell Morris, has earned his Master’s degree in Musicology and is currently preparing to take his Special Fields exam on queer and trans studies, Jewish studies, and Schoenberg studies in the Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Xavier is also working with Jessica Schwartz on a voice studies project featuring oral histories he took within trans community. In his spare time, Xavier goes birdwatching either by himself or with his friends and has a current life list (North American) bird count of 150 birds!