Her work is notably focused simultaneously on engaging in linguistic inquiry and producing community materials. Epps has regularly collaborated with members of linguistic communities to create documentation of material culture (in the form of, e.g., instructional videos for making items), history (both of the distant past and of recent events as told from elders), family trees, rituals (when given the explicit permission of community members), and pedagogical and reference materials for the language(s) of a given group.
Epps, in collaboration with Claire Bowern, Jane Hill, and Patrick McConvell compiled data to create the Hunter-Gatherer Database, an NSF- and ACLS-funded project with the purpose of collecting "lexical, grammatical, and other data from languages spoken by hunter-gatherer groups and their small-scale agrarian neighbors."
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The geographical regions of interest for the Hunter-Gatherer Database project were Australia (led by Bowern and McConvell), South America (led by Epps), and California and the Great Basin (led by Hill).
As of 2021, Epps serves on the Awards Subcommittee of the Linguistic Society of America's Committee on Endangered Languages and Their Preservation[5] and serves or has served on the editorial review board for the following publications:[3]
^ ab"Patience L. Epps". University of Texas at Austin Linguistics Department Faculty Directory. Retrieved 8 March 2021.
^Virginia, Epps, Patience, Department of Anthropology, University of. "A grammar of Hup". libraetd.lib.virginia.edu. Retrieved 2022-03-13.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
