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Abstract:

A long-standing question in studying the topology of complex algebraic varieties is the question of what groups can occur as the fundamental group of a smooth projective variety. One approximation of this question in the case of fibered varieties is to ask what groups can occur as the monodromy group of such a fibration. We use Hodge theory to investigate this question in the case of fibered algebraic surfaces, called Kodaira fibrations, whose fibers are all smooth and draw connections with questions about Shimura varieties and the moduli space of smooth algebraic curves.