13 June 1944) is Professor Emerita of Classics and Humanities at Saint Joseph College, Connecticut.
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.
[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.