Brian Fairley is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Music and History at the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD in Music from New York University in 2023 with a dissertation entitled "Dissected Listening: A Media History of Georgian Polyphony." His work explores Georgian traditional music from a historical and ethnographic perspective, drawing on techniques from media archaeology and the intertwined histories of race, technology, and music theory.