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] 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] 2 [4]
Perkins authored two important monographs, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era, and Roman Imperial Identities in the Early Christian Era.The Suffering Self had an 'enormous impact on how scholars of early Christianity understand depictions of the body in pain'.[2] 2 Roman Imperial Identities examines how two cosmopolitan social entities constructed specific identities during the consolidation of the Roman empire.The book gave the reader a better understanding of Christianity as a distinct phenomenon and the broader world it inhabited.[2] 2
In 2019, Perkins was honoured with a Festschrift, The Narrative Self in Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Judith Perkins, published by the Society of Biblical Literature, and featuring contributions from Virginia Burrus, Kate Cooper, and Ilaria Ramelli.[5]
