The United States Mint announced today (January 10, 2024) that the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury has appointed Dr. Peter van Alfen as the next Chairperson of the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC), effective January 30, 2024. By statute, the CCAC Chairperson is appointed from among the current members and serves a one-year term.
Dr. van Alfen was appointed to the CCAC in 2020 as the member specially qualified in numismatic curation.
Dr. van Alfen is Chief Curator at the American Numismatic Society (ANS), where he has served for more than 20 years. Dr. van Alfen was initially hired as curator of ancient Greek coinage, and his curatorial responsibilities were later expanded to include the medallic art section. For more than a decade, Dr. van Alfen has served on the J. Sanford Saltus Award Committee, which bestows awards to living artists for achievement in medallic art. In recent years, he has been involved in the creation of several of the ANS’s online resources, including the Hellenistic Royal Coinages (HRC) project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Art of Devastation, a site devoted to the medallic art of the First World War.
Dr. van Alfen has been instrumental in leading and developing the ANS’s flagship educational program, the Eric P. Newman Summer Graduate Seminar, and has served for 15 years as editor of the ANS’s quarterly, ANS Magazine. Dr. van Alfen’s publications include more than a dozen books and scores of articles on ancient coinage and monetary systems, as well as on U.S. and European medallic art, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2019, Dr. van Alfen received the Burnett Anderson Memorial Award for Excellence in Numismatic Writing.
Dr. van Alfen holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in Anthropology (Nautical Archaeology) from Texas A&M University, and a B.A. in Classics from the University of Utah. He has participated in several ancient shipwreck excavations and surveys in Turkey and Egypt and continues to be an Affiliated Scholar with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA).
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