Erin Darby is an assistant 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 travel fellowships supporting her research at the American Center of Oriental 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 book, Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines: Gender and Empire in Judean Apotropaic Ritual (Mohr Siebeck 2014), draws upon her knowledge of Late Bronze through Persian period female figurines in Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Most recently she has begun work on the purported Edomite shrine at the site of ‘En Hazeva in southern Israel. She is also the co-director of the ‘Ayn Gharandal Archaeological Project, excavating a Nabataean-Islamic period site in southern Jordan and leads the UT Dig Jordan study abroad program. Here in Tennessee, she is one of the founding members of the Partnership for the Academic Study of Early Judaism, the East Tennessee Hebrew Reading Group, the Annual Arab Fest, and the Tennessee Initiative for Middle East Studies. At the national level, Erin chairs a number of committees related to archaeological research for the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Society of Biblical Literature.

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