Nikolaos Panou received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton. He has also been Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and Peter V. Tsantes Endowed Professor in Hellenic Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He has written on topics ranging from Byzantine historiography to seventeenth-century satire and has co-edited a collective volume entitled Evil Lords: Theories and Representations of Tyranny from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Oxford University Press). Among other things, he is currently working on a book manuscript, which examines the ways sovereignty was represented and theorized in didactic discourse, such as hagiographies, chronicles, advice treatises, and moral disquisitions, produced in Southeastern Europe from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. The book offers a systematic discussion of the discursive mechanisms through which Byzantine imperial ideology was reclaimed as a prerequisite for the representation and legitimization of monarchical power in the Ottoman East, and also recovers the influence of little-known works on the intellectual evolution of the early modern Balkans by indicating their role in a gradual reconfiguration of key ethico-political concepts that eventually facilitated the integration of Enlightenment tensions in the region at a critical point in its history. [Last Updated 2023]