We describe the closure of the strata of Abelian differentials with prescribed type of zeros and poles, in the projectivized Hodge bundle over the Deligne–Mumford moduli space of stable curves with marked points. We provide an explicit characterization of pointed stable differentials in the boundary of the closure, both a complex analytic proof and a flat geometric proof for smoothing the boundary differentials, and numerous examples. The main new ingredient in our description is a global residue condition arising from a full order on the dual graph of a stable curve.

We study the non-klt locus of singularities of pairs. We show that given a pair (X, B) and a projective morphism X → Z with connected fibres such that −(KX +B) is nef over Z, the non-klt locus of (X, B) has at most two connected components near each fibre of X → Z. This was conjectured by Hacon and Han. In a different direction we answer a question of Mark Gross on connectedness of the non-klt loci of certain pairs. This is motivated by constructions in Mirror Symmetry.

We introduce the notions of strong local Torelli and T-class for polarized manifolds, and prove that strong local Torelli implies global Torelli theorem on the Torelli spaces for polarized manifolds in the T-class. We discuss many new examples of projective manifolds for which such global Torelli theorem holds. As applications we prove that, in these cases, a canonical completion of the Torelli space is a bounded pseudoconvex domain in complex Euclidean space, and show that generic Torelli implies global Torelli on moduli space with certain level structure.

We develop a new technique to study ranks of multiplication maps for linear series via limit linear series and degenerations to chains of elliptic curves. We prove an elementary criterion and apply it to proving cases of the Maximal Rank Conjecture. We give a new proof of the case of quadrics, and also treat several families in the case of cubics. Our proofs do not require restrictions on direction of approach, so we recover new information on the locus in the moduli space of curves on which the maximal rank condition fails.

We show that Q-Fano varieties of fixed dimension with anti-canonical degrees and alpha-invariants bounded from below form a bounded family. As a corollary, K-semistable Q-Fano varieties of fixed dimension with anti-canonical degrees bounded from below form a bounded family.