Since 1990 she has taught at the University of Chicago where she is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College.
[2] Born in Philadelphia to a family of artists,[5] she studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in Music History and Theory in 1987.
Feldman’s scholarship has centered on vernacular vocal genres and performances, often Italian, from the sixteenth century through the present.
Her first monograph, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995) is, in the words of Laura Buch, "an interdisciplinary study whose dense multilayering constructs a labyrinthine hall of mirrors that chronicles patterns of Venetian literary, musical, and political thought at mid-sixteenth century.
[11] Of this contribution to the castrato literature, Uta Protz writes, "What Feldman's meticulously researched, beautifully written and richly illustrated work achieves is to finally shed light on the contradictory rise, voices and eventual demise of the castrati, and, moreover, to convincingly show that these castrated males were produced not as non-men but as idealized men.