 Harkins was a tenured Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department and a member of the Judaic Studies faculty at Fairfield University in Connecticut, where she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award by the College of Arts and Sciences in 2011.She then held a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom to undertake research on religious experience at Qumran.Following that fellowship, she joined the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry as an Associate Professor of the New Testament in their Ecclesiastical Faculty.