CEMS Best Thesis Award for MA students in the Advanced Certificate Program in Eastern Mediterranean Studies this year goes to Zeynep Olgun (Medieval Studies, 2YMA) for her thesis "A Sailor's Life for Me: The Middle Byzantine Sailor on Board and at Port," supervised by Prof. Baukje van den Berg.
Congratulations, Zeynep!
Zeynep's thesis "constitutes an important contribution to the scholarship in the field by giving voice to the lower classes of Byzantine society. It combines ethnographical data, archaeological evidence and textual sources in an interdisciplinary and innovative analysis of the life and experiences of Byzantine sailors on board and at the port. The thesis is well written, appropriately structured, and confidently argued, and points to the larger project that Zeynep will pursue in her doctoral studies at Cambridge."