Since 2009, Neff has been the Christopher Hogwood Historically Informed Performance Fellow with Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, and coordinates the partnership between MIT and the Society. She is a two-time recipient of the Levitan Teaching Prize in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
Neff received her PhD in Historical Musicology from Boston University in 1998, where she specialized in the music of late 18th-century Vienna. Since then, she has presented a variety of papers at national and international conferences on topics ranging from the music of the 18th and 19th centuries and performance practice to The Beatles. She co-edited The Handel and Haydn Society: Bringing Music to Life for 200 Years, and her research into the Handel and Haydn Society’s publishing history resulted in the CD, The Old Colony Collection, issued on the CORO label. Her performing editions of three symphonies by the 18th-century composer Gottfried van Swieten have been published by Artaria.