Peter Jorgensen taught for 36 years, first at the University of California in Riverside, living 70 feet from the main break of the San Andreas Fault, and subsequently at the University of Georgia.  He has taught a wide variety of courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, from Indo-European and Germanic linguistics to the literature and mythology of the older Germanic language areas.

At the University of Georgia he played an active role in the training of the most qualified undergraduates applying for national awards (e.g. Rhodes, Marshall, Fulbright, Goldwater scholarships) and served for twelve years as the Director of the Foundation Fellows Program, the university's premier, undergraduate scholarship and enrichment program.  He has served for many years as teacher and  Assistant Director for the University of New Orleans Summer School Program in Innsbruck, Austria.

His research has taken him to Iceland, Denmark and Austria on numerous occasions, and his fields of research have included the identification and editing of medieval Icelandic manuscripts (esp. the exempla translated from Middle English and Latin), the Bear's Son Folktale in Old Norse and Old English literature, the medieval German manuscripts of the pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, computer-based instruction in German, the editing and translating of Old Icelandic sagas, 18th-century saga forgeries, and the linguistic classification of loanwords.