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Jeremy Simmons Awarded AIIS and SSRC Fellowships

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Jeremy Simmons, an ABD Ph.D. candidate in Classical Studies, has received two external fellowships to support his dissertation research on Indo-Mediterranean commerce during the 2018-19 academic year. Jeremy is one of 15 recipients of a Junior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), which funds dissertation research in India. Thanks to the AIIS, he will spend 5 months based at the École Française d’Extrême-Orient in Pondicherry, in order to better study the consumption of Roman coins and wine in ancient India. While in India, Jeremy plans to investigate and catalog the Roman coin and archaeological finds housed at museums throughout Tamil Nadu, such as the Government Museum in Chennai. Later on, he will extensively study the epigraphic sources related to trade located at Buddhist sites throughout Maharashtra, such as Nasik, Karle, and Junnar. Many of these inscriptions record donations to Buddhist sites by traders, including those hailing from the Mediterranean world. In addition, he hopes to conduct research at relevant archaeological sites including Arikamedu, Pattanam, and Nagarjunakonda, as well as academic institutions like the Indian Institute of Research in Numismatic Studies in Nasik and Deccan College in Pune. Jeremy is the recipient of the named Daniel H.H. Ingalls Memorial Fellowship in addition to the standard Junior Fellowship.

In addition to the AIIS fellowship, Jeremy also received one of 70 Mellon-funded International Dissertation Research Fellowships (IDRF) from the Social Science Research Council. The IDRF will enable Jeremy to study the relevant archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the consumption of Indian spices and gems throughout the Mediterranean world and to clarify research that he will have conducted in India prior to fellowship period. Jeremy will spend a combined 9 months on fellowship in 2019 thanks to funding from the IDRF, dividing his time between the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States. In the UK, he plans to catalog data from Roman, Kushan, and Western Kṣatrapa coins and archaeological finds of Indo-Mediterranean commerce housed at the British Museum and make use of pertinent resources at Oxford University. While in Oxford in particular, he hopes to partake in the Oxford Roman Economy Project and Gandhara Connections initiatives and to conduct numismatic research at the Ashmolean. In Italy, Jeremy will focus his attention to museum holdings in Rome and Naples, as well as well-preserved archaeological sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum. He will spend the final months of the fellowship in New York with the numismatic and material collections of the American Numismatic Society and the Metropolitan Museum.

Jeremy plans to participate in the annual AIIS conference for fellowship recipients in Delhi, as well as the SSRC annual workshop for recipients of the IDRF, which will take place after the award period. For more information and updates regarding Jeremy's fellowship research, you can visit his companion website hereSee more about Jeremy Simmons.