Nikolaos Panou
Nikolaos Panou received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University with a dissertation on "How to do Kings with Words: Byzantine Imperial Ideology and the Representation of Power in Pre-Phanariot Admonitory Literature." His research examines the ways power and authority were conceptualized and represented in pre-modern philosophical discourse, with a particular focus on moral and political works produced in the Ottoman Balkans in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He has won numerous fellowships and awards for his graduate studies, including a Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies Research Grant and the Aristides Evangelus Phoutrides Scholarship in Modern Greek Studies. During 2008-2009, he held the Hannah Seeger Davis Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in Princeton's Program in Hellenic Studies. His scholarly interests extend over a number of fields, such as reception studies, late antique rhetoric and ideology, medieval hagiography, early modern moral and political thought, Romanticism, Surrealist literature and art, and film studies. While a graduate student at Harvard, he taught a wide range of courses in the Department of the Classics and the Core Curriculum, as well as in The Greek Institute, where he offered a series of self-designed seminars on modern Greek literature and culture. At Princeton he will conduct an extensive study of the Phanariot Enlightenment and the impetus for change and modernization it introduced to the Ottoman Empire. He is also in the process of editing, with Hester Schadee, a collective volume on tyranny and conceptions of bad kingship from Antiquity to the Renaissance. In the last two years he has taught courses on topics ranging from late medieval representations of power to applied ethics, also joining in Spring 2011 the faculty team of Humanistic Studies 216-219, a course exploring interdisciplinary approaches to Western culture from Antiquity to the present. This year he will co-teach with Professor Anthony Grafton a course on the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, focusing on the role of this intellectual controversy in redefining concepts such as mimesis and originality, objectivity and imagination, tradition and innovation, decline and progress.