The American Numismatic Society (ANS) is pleased to announce that Melissa Ludke has been selected as the inaugural recipient for the Chairman’s Fellowship for Numismatic Research. The fellowship will go toward funding her dissertation research and planned book project: “Cosa and Socio-Economic Interactions among Middle Republican Cities in Central and South Etruria.”
Ludke is a doctoral candidate in Classical Archaeology at Florida State University, where she earned her MA in Classical Archaeology; she received her BA in Anthropology from Grand Valley State University. Ludke has worked on the Cosa excavations in Ansedonia, Italy since 2016, and the Excavation Coins Inventory Project with the Soprintendenza Archeologica della Toscana since 2022. Her dissertation will investigate the interactions between Cosa and neighboring cities in the third century BCE by reexamining materials from the site – including coin assemblages of regional, foreign, and Roman origin, to determine overlapping circulation patterns and how those inform an interpretation of those relationships.
Ludke will present her research at a future Long Table lecture, hosted by the ANS and open to members of the Society.
The ANS awards a limited number of Chairman’s Fellowships each year, worth between $1,500 and $2,500 USD each, to qualified graduate students or scholars pursuing serious numismatic research projects that are expected to result in academic publication. More information about the fellowship and applying can be found at numismatics.org/chairmans-fellowships-for-numismatic-research/.
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The American Numismatic Society (ANS), organized in 1858 and incorporated in 1865 in New York State, operates as a research museum under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and is recognized as a publicly supported organization under section 170(b)(1)(A)(vi) as confirmed on November 1, 1970.
