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 late antique rhetoric and ideology, Radical Enlightenment and the skeptical tradition, European Romanticism, Surrealist literature and art, and early cinema. He has published on topics ranging from seventeenth-century satire and Greek-Romanian symbiotic patterns in the early modern period to Cypriot dialectic texts and contemporary Greek poetry. While a graduate student at Harvard, Panou taught a wide range of courses in the Department of Classics and the Core Curriculum, as well as in The Greek Institute, where he offered a series of self-designed seminars in modern Greek language, literature, and culture. During his tenure at the Society of Fellows, he will conduct an extensive study of the Phanariot Enlightenment and the processes of modernization it introduced to the Ottoman Empire. In 2009-2010, he will offer a comparative course on Islamic, Byzantine and West European "mirrors for princes," and a seminar on the late seventeenth-century Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.