Nikolaos Panou is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Peter V. Tsantes Endowed Professor in Hellenic Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University. Before coming to Stony Brook he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. His research and teaching interests include reception studies, Byzantine, Modern Greek, and Middle Eastern literatures and cultures, Orientalism, Mediterranean studies, film studies, conceptual history, and history of emotions.
He has written on topics ranging from Byzantine historiography to seventeenth-century satire and has also co-edited a collective volume on conceptions of tyranny from Antiquity to the Renaissance that is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Among other things, he is currently working on a book manuscript, titled How to do Kings with Words: Power and Propaganda in the Ottoman Balkans, which examines the ways sovereignty was represented and theorized in post-Byzantine didactic discourse, and especially in treatises on the ideal prince produced in Southeastern Europe from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. The book offers a systematic discussion of the historical conditions and semantic mechanisms that enabled the articulation of a monarchical theory for Orthodox rulers in the Ottoman Balkans, showing how the calculated reception and appropriation of basic elements of Byzantine imperial ideology was designed to serve urgent propagandistic agendas and had a major impact on the geopolitical, institutional, and cultural configuration of the area at crucial points in its history.