We are thrilled to announce that Assistant Professor Grace Erny is the recipient of the 2026 Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs.
Excellent mentorship has a transformative effect on our graduate students’ well-being, academic success, and overall experience, and even more so in these challenging times. It is something to be celebrated and acknowledged. Professor Grace Erny has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to helping UC Berkeley graduate students to succeed academically, professionally, and personally.
Grace Erny is an assistant professor in the Department of Ancient Greek & Roman Studies and affiliated faculty at the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology and the Archaeological Research Facility. Her research focuses primarily on the archaeology and history of Greece and the Aegean in the first millennium BCE. Her current book project investigates economic inequality, social differentiation, and rural communities in Early Iron Age, Archaic, and Classical Crete. Other published and in-progress work includes contributions on statistical approaches to survey data, Crete in the Homeric epics, the contemporary archaeology of the Greek countryside, the gender sociology of Mediterranean survey archaeology, and conservatism in Cretan material culture. She has served as staff on three archaeological projects in Greece -- the Western Argolid Regional Project, the Bays of East Attica Regional Survey, and the Anavlochos Project in east Crete -- and has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Israel, Cyprus, and the American Southwest.
Professor Erny, nominated by faculty colleagues and current and former graduate students and undergraduates, was selected from a pool of exceptional Berkeley faculty and graduate students. She exemplifies the values and best practices of effective mentoring that are core to our university community and mission.
Join us on Thursday, April 16, from 5:00 - 7:00 p.m. at the Alumni House, Toll Room to celebrate the achievements of Grace and other 2026 Graduate Mentoring Award Recipients