Dr Laura Petersen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Lucerne and an Adjunct Research Fellow at La Trobe University. Her research is cross-disciplinary, integrating approaches to remedies and legal history with aesthetics. Currently, Laura is working on her postdoc project on the Weimar Republic at the University of Lucerne as part of the Swiss National Science Foundation major project grant Imagining Justice: Law, Politics and Popular Visual Culture in Weimar Germany.

Laura's first monograph Practices of Restitution: Law and Aesthetics in Modern Germany was published by Cambridge University Press in 2026 (Open Access). The book offers a new understanding of restitution, focusing on the dynamic practices of law, literature and art in the aftermath of WWII in Germany. Laura has also published on topics such as legal cartoons, legal aesthetics and Swiss identity (in German), legal method, and prisoner art in the Weimar Republic (forthcoming). She co-edited a recent special issue on Law and Art in the Aftermath with Steven Howe.

Laura is co-editing the forthcoming book Law, Politics, and the Visual in Weimar Germany (Camden House, 2027) with Steven Howe, as well as The Cambridge Handbook of Law, History and the Visual (Cambridge University Press, 2027) with Steven Howe and Desmond Manderson.

Laura was the winner of the Harold Luntz Graduate Research Prize (University of Melbourne, 2022) for her PhD research and the inaugural international writing prize Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature and Justice (University of Texas, 2021) for her research on a German lawyer, Dr Walter Schwarz, and his glossatorial writings.

Recently in 2025, Laura was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Diversity, Media and Law (DiML) at the University of Giessen, supported by a project grant by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Laura's research has also been supported by further international grant funding from the DAAD, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences and Universitas 21. 

Laura qualified to be a lawyer in Australia and is a graduate of the University of Melbourne (LLB, 1st Hons) (BA) (PhD) and FU Berlin (MA). She is currently Vice-President of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia and a founding convenor of the Swiss Law and Humanities Hub.

La Trobe HDR Supervision: Elizabeth Rajapakshe (PhD candidate), working on a cultural legal analysis of the ethics of care. Jointly with Kathleen Birrell.