Martha Feldman is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of Music. Her many honors include the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association in 2001, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Ruth A. Solie Prize of the American Musicological Society in 2007. She was the Ernst Bloch Visiting Professor and Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley in 2007. Her latest book, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007) won the Laing Prize for 2010. Other books include City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995, winner of the Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth Century Conference), The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (coedited, Oxford University Press, 2006), and various musical editions. She is currently working on two books. The Castrato in Nature (forthcoming from University of California Press) investigates different relationships of castrati to nature, non-nature, and innate kinds. A second book, The Castrato’s Tale, is planned as a study of the interplay of myth and narrative in castrato autobiography.