Martha Feldman is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College. She works on vocal practices, genres, and performances, often Italian, from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries, including those of madrigalists, courtesans, castrati and other early modern singers, and jazz singers. Her Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007, winner of the Gordon J. Laing Award of the University of Chicago Press), rethought the institution of opera seria as a total social phenomenon, adapting classic concepts of ritual, festivity, kingship, sacrifice, and myth from anthropology to materialist approaches from microhistory. She's the co-editor on a project called “Errant Voices: Performances beyond Measure” that explores insurgent and resilient voices across trans, raced, and castrato cases.