[2] In 1937 she received her doctorate, supervised by Karl Reinhardt from Frankfurt for a piece of work on the "... history of personification (προσωποποιία) in Greek poetry and visual art" ("Zur Geschichte der Personifikation in griechischer Dichtung und bildender Kunst").
[2] Under her leadership the business produced academic editions of German classics and Reformation literature, including the works of Goethe, Schiller and Luther, along with the humanities more generally.
[1] Meanwhile the Böhlau company continued for several decades to be one of the last independent publishing businesses inside what had become, in October 1949, the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
[1] Alongside her responsibilities in publishing, between 1961 and 1972 Petersen held a part time appointment as a Classical Philosopher and Senior Assistant at the Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Successful projects included producing an updated and enlarged edition of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, a lexicon of Roman Empire state officials.