Martha Feldman

As a music historian, Martha Feldman has written cultural histories of European vernacular musics, ca. 1500-present, exploring relationships between social/political phenomena, artistic production, the senses and sensibilities of listeners, the interplay of myth, festivity, and kingship in opera, and figures of the musical artist. Her books include City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995), The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited, Oxford University Press, 2006), Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and various musical editions. She is also general editor of Critical and Cultural Musicology (Garland and Routledge, 2000-02).

In 1996 she won the Bainton Prize of the 16th-Century Studies Conference and the Centre for Reformation Studies for City Culture; in 2001 the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association; and in 2007 the Ruth A. Solie Prize of the American Musicological Society for The Courtesan's Arts; and in and in 2010, the Gordon W. Laing Award for the faculty book that has brought the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press in the previous three years.

Her work has been funded by the AAUW, the NEH, the ACLS, the American Philosophical Society, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1998-99 she held an invited year-long position as a Getty Scholar. Currently she is at work on two books on the Italian castrato as an index of European cultural transformation, 1560-1922: The Castrato in Nature (University of California Press), an investigation into different relationships of castrati to nature, non-nature and innate kinds which have emerged from her six Ernest Bloch Lectures at the University of California Berkeley (fall 2007), and The Castrato's Tale, on the play of myth and narrative in castrato autobiography.

Feldman earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 and has been at UChicago since 1991.