Martha Feldman

Martha Feldman is the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in Music and Theater & Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of several award-winning monographs: City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995), Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in 18th-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (University of California Press, 2015), based on her six Bloch Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her newest book, Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular at Rome, is forthcoming from Zone Books in February 2026. She is also the coeditor of two essay collections, The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (2006) and The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality (2019), as well as two special journal issues: “Music and Sound at the Edges of History” (Representations, 2021) and “Sounding the Spectral” (Portable Gray, 2025).

Feldman’s current and recent projects include work on Maria Callas, the choreography of Bintou Dembélé, the voice of Nina Simone, errant voices in performance, and Greek rebetiko, memory, and the senses. With Martin Stokes and Dafni Tragaki, she is currently launching a multiyear, multidisciplinary international project on “Love / Music: Problematics of a Relationship.”

Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Getty Research Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the American Association of University Women, among others. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association.