James Ace received his Ph.D. in Musicology from UCLA in 2024. He is associate director of the UCLA Practice-based Experimental Epistemology Research (PEER) Lab and teaches courses including  Music and Gender and Music and Politics in the Department of Musicology.

Ace’s scholarship explores representations of race, gender, and sexuality in nineteenth-century American music and mass entertainment, focusing on histories of sexual minorities. As a researcher of communities who are under-represented in traditional archives, James is invested in developing listening- and practice-based methods of studying the past and writing history. An ACA Certified Archivist, James has also been processing and managing the music archive at Sinai Temple in Westwood since 2019.