Martha Feldman, Past President of the AMS (2017-18), has been named the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professorship in the Department of Music and the College at the University of Chicago. The most recent musicologist to hold the chair was Howard Mayer Brown. Previously she was the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Music.

A cultural historian, Feldman centers her scholarship on different vernacular music from 1500 to the present. Her wide-ranging scholarship has encompassed madrigals in the civic culture of Renaissance Venice; the music of courtesans and 18th-century opera as a manifestation and refraction of changing notions of sovereignty, myth and festivity; and the entanglements of voice with race, alterity, media, memory and historical practice.

Feldman has written and edited many books and monographs, including The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality (2019), co-edited with Judith T. Zeitlin; The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (2015); and  Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (2007), which received the 2010 Gordon J. Laing Award of the University of Chicago Press. Among many honors and distinctions, she received the 2001 Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association and the 2009 Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.