Research areas

Primary research topics

Lars Williams explores psychological suffering as a consequence of war and violence. He is particularly interested in how culture and social practice mediates experiences and symptoms of mental illness. Williams’ current research examines how Danish soldiers manage experiences of war and the transition from military deployment to civil everyday life.

Current research

Lars Williams current research focuses on military psychology, on soldiers’ experiences with war and violence, and on how these experiences are managed in everyday life after military deployment has ended. In this regard, Williams examines how social contexts mediate the experiences, symptoms, paths of treatment and help-seeking behavior for mental health issues.  

He also explores the role of psychology in shaping our current understanding of suffering and the way psychological sciences is utilized in military contexts, e.g. through the use of psychological training programs, psychoeducation in the military, and how the concepts of resilience and moral injury challenge the notion of post-traumatic tress disorder (PTSD), as well as how veterans employ psychology in their understanding of post-deployment predicaments and suffering.

Williams works with qualitative methods and ethnographic fieldwork towards understanding psychopathologies as social phenomena that are embodied and enacted within sociocultural niches. 

Projects

Lars Williams is a postdoctoral researcher in the research project Wars, Pandemics and The Human Mind.

Williams’ part of the project is on how Danish and American soldiers manage psychological predicaments of military deployment, how soldiers are trained psychologically for deployment, and how these experiences are managed in the everyday life of veterans after deployment ends.

From 2025, Lars Williams is Principal Investigator on the project After War: Moral injury and the politics of trauma (2025-2028). 
The research project is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.