Simpson's classic nonabelian Hodge correspondence establishes an equivalence of categories between local systems on a projective manifold, and certain Higgs sheaves on that manifold. This talk surveys recent generalisations of Simpson's correspondence to the context of projective varieties with klt singularities. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, these spaces exhibit two correspondences: one pertaining to local systems on the whole space, and one to local systems on its smooth locus. As one application, we resolve the quasi-étale uniformisation problem for minimal varieties of general type, and to obtain a complete numerical characterisation of singular quotients of the unit ball by discrete, co-compact groups of automorphisms that act freely in codimension one.[-]

Almost one decade ago, Poonen constructed the first examples of algebraic varieties over global fields for which Skorobogatov's etale Brauer-Manin obstruction does not explain the failure of the Hasse principle. By now, several constructions are known, but they all share common geometric features such as large fundamental groups.
This talk discusses a construction of simply connected fourfolds over global fields of positive characteristic for which the Brauer-Manin machinery fails. Contrary to earlier work in this direction, our construction does not rely on major conjectures. Instead, we establish a new diophantine result of independent interest: a Mordell-type theorem for Campana's "geometric orbifolds" over function fields of positive characteristic. Along the way, we also construct the first example of simply connected surface of general type over a global field with a non-empty, but non-Zariski dense set of rational points.
Joint work with Pereira and Smeets.[-]