Robert Xavier Browning is a professor at Purdue University and head of the C-SPAN Archives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
In 1981, he was awarded his Ph.D., also from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, under the direction of Ira Sharkansky with the thesis "Political and economic predictors of policy outcomes: U.S. social welfare expenditures, 1947-1977".
[4][5] At Purdue, Browning teaches courses related to American politics and the United States Congress.
[7] In September 1987, the archive began cataloguing recordings of C-SPAN's coverage of Congress and other public affairs programming.
[3] He facilitates educational access to C-SPAN's collection and oversees the archives, which are located in Purdue Research Park in West Lafayette, Indiana.