Jeremy A. Simmons

Jeremy Simmons specializes in ancient history. He investigates the ancient world in a broad sense—what Greco-Roman geographers thought of as the oikoumene, which spanned roughly from Iberia to India. Accordingly, he focuses not only on the texts and material culture of the Greek and Roman world, but also those of the ancient Near East and Indian subcontinent.

His current research addresses long-distance maritime commerce in the western Indian Ocean during the early centuries of the Common Era. He is working on a book project that focuses on the consumption of goods traded across the Indian Ocean in antiquity, addressing representative Mediterranean and Indian commodities in their new social and cultural contexts. His work has been published in periodicals such as the Journal of Global History, Ancient Society, and the American Journal of Numismatics, as well as in several edited volumes.

Simmons earned his Ph.D. in Classical Studies at Columbia University and his B.A. in Classics and Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Maryland, Simmons was a Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome (FAAR ’20) and held a postdoc at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (New York University). During the 2023–24 academic year, he will hold two fellowships: at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, DC) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ).