Prof. Erin Darby is Associate Professor ​of Early Judaism in the University of Tennessee's Department of Religio​us Studies and the UT Faculty Director of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. She holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from Missouri State University and a Ph.D. in Religion from Duke University. She is the author of Interpreting Judean Pillar Figurines: Gender and Empire in Judean Apotropaic Ritual (Mohr Siebeck, 2014) ​and co-editor of the new volume, Iron Age Terracotta Figurines from the Southern Levant in Context (Brill, 2021). Her work has been supported by an Educational and Cultural Affairs Research Fellowship and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship at the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem. She has also received institutional funding to support research at the American Center of Research in Amman, Jordan and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia, Cyprus. Erin is also an active field archaeologist, working in Israel and Jordan. Since 2009, she and her husband, Dr. Robert Darby, have co-directed the Ayn Gharandal Archaeological Project ​in southern Jordan.