Rothenberg was appointed Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard in 1986. The same year, he began a course of three separate research years as a Fellow at institutes for advanced study. In 1986, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; In 1993, he was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Wassenaar; and he returned as a Fellow to CASBS in 2014.