Vilde Aaslid is an interdisciplinary music scholar with interests in text and improvisation. She completed her PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia in 2014, supported by a Jefferson Scholars Foundation fellowship. Her current book project examines the cultural and aesthetic interrelation of improvised music and poetry, building on her dissertation on jazz poetry intersection. Her work on Charles Mingus recently appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music. She is also an active performer of the Norwegian hardanger fiddle and practitioner of traditional Norwegian singing and dancing. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia in 2015-2016.