Erin Darby is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee and the co-director of the ‘Ayn Gharandal Archaeological Project in southern Jordan. She graduated with her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Duke University in 2011. Erin has been the recipient of several awards, including a number of fellowships supporting her research at the American Center of Overseas Research in Amman, Jordan, the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, in Nicosia, Cyprus, and at the Damascus and Aleppo Museums in Syria. She also received a State Department Educational and Cultural Affairs Research Fellowship (2007) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2016) for her work at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.

Erin is an expert in the Hebrew Bible, ancient Near Eastern history, literature, and archaeology, and specializes in ancient religion and iconography. Her first book, Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines: Gender and Empire in Judean Apotropaic Ritual (Mohr Siebeck 2014), and her co-authored volume, Iron Age Terracotta Figurines from the Southern Levant in Context (Brill, 2021) draw upon her knowledge of Late Bronze through Persian period female figurines in Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Most recently she has been working on the purported Edomite shrine at the site of ‘En Hazeva in southern Israel and preparing a monograph focusing on the role of ancient craft specialists and religious identity in southern Israel and Jordan during the Iron Age. Erin is also an active field archaeologist and serves as the co-director of the ‘Ayn Gharandal Archaeological Project, excavating a Roman through Islamic period site in southern Jordan. For years she led the UT Dig Jordan Study Abroad program.

In addition to other service commitments at UT, Erin served as UT’s Inaugural Faculty Director of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships in the Division of Student Success (2021-2023), where her team greatly expanded the number of faculty and students supported through research funding and programming, especially First Generation and Pell Eligible students. Erin is particularly active in community engagement and outreach. She is one of the founding members of UT’s annual Archaeology Day celebration, “Can You Dig It?, Knoxville’s annual Arab Fest, and the UT Program in Middle East Studies. She is active in the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies and the Jewish Studies Interdisciplinary Program. Current projects include a collaboration with Knox County Schools and the Division of Access and Engagement to support middle school teachers who deliver world religions content as part of the TN social studies standards and a curriculum development project with the Teaching and Learning Innovation Office and the Division of Student Success to improve retention rates for first-year students.