In 1976, Perkins was hired to teach Classics at Saint Joseph College, Connecticut (now St Joseph University). where she is now Emerita. In 1979, she attended a National Endowment of the Humanities summer seminar led by Wayne Meeks on the social world of early Christianity at Yale University. The timing of the seminar enabled Perkins to manage childcare responsibilities, and subsequently she combined her research on Classics with early Christianity. Her insistence on bringing the two fields together has been described as 'one of her most significant contributions'. 2 Perkins was a long-standing contributor to the International Conference on the Ancient Novel (ICAN), and contributed to the field by mentoring younger scholars 2
