Leena Petersen was a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the Rosenzweig Center from October 2007 to April 2008. Her research topic was "Negative Aesthetics in German-Jewish Thought". She presented this research project at the BAJS 2010, an extended article of which was published by the BAJS in 2011 under the title "On Aniconism and Negative Aesthetics in German-Jewish Thought in the 19th/20th Century".

From April 2008 to June 2009 Leena Petersen was an associated research fellow at the Rosenzweig Center and worked on the comparative research project "Transformations of the Utopian. From Jewish Apologetics to Dialectics of the Enlightenment" at the University of Sussex.