Rate My Professor Chari Larsson

Dr. Chari Larsson is a Senior Lecturer in art history and theory at the Queensland College of Art and Design, Griffith University, where she also serves as Higher Degree Research Convenor. She earned her PhD in Art History from the University of Queensland in 2015, receiving the Dean's Award for Outstanding PhD Theses for her dissertation on the work of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. Prior to her appointment at Griffith, Larsson was a PhD candidate in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. She holds an Honours Class 1 degree from the University of Sydney obtained in 1996. Larsson lectures in modern and contemporary art history and theory and supervises higher degree research students in these areas.

Larsson's academic research centers on theories of images and representation, twentieth-century French intellectual history, philosophical approaches to spectatorship, trauma studies, photography and war, biography, life-writing, and visual life narratives during periods of war and conflict. Her current research project investigates visual life narratives amid conflict. She is the author of the monograph Didi-Huberman and the Image (Manchester University Press, 2020), the first extensive English-language study of Didi-Huberman's research on images, which was supported by the Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication Subsidy Scheme. Other key publications include the book chapter "Quiet Trauma and the War in Ukraine" in Psychosocial and Cultural Perspectives on the War in Ukraine (2024); "Scandal in the museum: a symptomatic response" in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2022); "Didi-Huberman and art history's amicable incursions" in the Journal of Art Historiography (2020); "Against a Melancholic Art History: The Afterlife of Images" in The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture (2019); "Making Monsters in László Nemes’ Son of Saul" in Senses of Cinema (2016); and "And the Word Becomes Flesh: Georges Didi-Huberman’s Symptom in the Image" in emaj: issue 8 (2015). Larsson has contributed 17 articles to The Conversation on topics ranging from iconic war images like 'Accidental Napalm' to contemporary art exhibitions. She has delivered public lectures, including "Diaries of War and Life" in 2024, and participated in collaborative research funded by the British Academy. Her scholarship advances critical engagements with images in art history and cultural theory.