IPCAA's Nadhira Hill sucessfully defended her dissertation "De-centering the Symposium: Characterizing Commensality in Late Classical Olynthos, Greece" on Mon, Feb 20.

Hill's dissertation "aims to do two things. First, it seeks to determine to what extent the site of Olynthos in northern Greece participated in Athenian cultural practices, particularly surrounding social drinking. Athenian evidence has been privileged in scholarship on Greek drinking and has contributed to the centering of the symposium, a formal, all-male drinking party; forms of drinking that are not considered to be sympotic have been largely ignored. Therefore, the second aim of this project is to develop a model for identifying and characterizing both formal and informal social drinking in Classical Greece. The purpose of this project is to expand our understanding of the social importance of drinking in the Greek world to include groups beyond the small elite group traditionally associated with sympotic drinking."

Brava on your defense, Nadhira!