Ruth Perry has long interested herself in eighteenth-century English literature and culture, women's writing, and feminist theory and has lectured all over the world on these subjects. She was the founding director of the MIT Women's Studies program; in 2000 she was elected president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. The author of numerous books and articles, many reprinted in anthologies, she has written on canonical figures as Pope, Sterne, Richardson, and Austen as well as on contemporary women writers such as Grace Paley and Mary Gordon. She has been awarded grants by the NEH and the NSF for projects on the social context of science, as well as fellowships from Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Bunting Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, and most recently a senior NEH research fellowship. She has also been honored as a MacVicar fellow at MIT in recognition of her contributions to undergraduate teaching.

Her books include Women, Letters, and the Novel (1980); Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners (1985); an edition of George Ballard's 1752 Several Ladies of Great Britain (1984); The Celebrated Mary Astell (1986); Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Culture and Literature 1748-1818 (2004), and a scholarly edition of Charlotte Lennox's 1758 Henrietta (2008). She also guest edited a special double issue on "Ballads and Songs in the Eighteenth Century" for The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation in 2006, complete with musical illustrations, some of which she recorded herself. She is completing a volume of essays on Jane Austen and has begun work on a biography of Anna Gordon Brown, an eighteenth-century singer of traditional ballads. A folksinger herself, her current research and teaching interests include the history of collecting, preserving, and performing folk music --particularly in eighteenth-century Scotland. Ruth Perry also loves to swim and the Z-center chose her as "Member of the Month" in January 2007 because of her faithful attendance at the pool.