Course Description
In these lectures we will survey the generic vanishing results of Green, Lazarfeld, Hacon, Popa, Pareschi and others and discuss their applications to the study of the birational geometry of irregular varieties i.e. smooth projective varieties such that01.png. In particular we will discuss results concerning the cohomological characterization of abelian varieties, the singularities of divisors on abelian varieties, the pluricanonical maps of irregular varieties and a recent result of Cao-Paun which proves the Iitaka conjecture for fiber spaces 02.png where03.pngis a variety of maximal Albanese dimension (eg. an abelian variety).