Automorphisms and moduli spaces of varieties with ample canonical class via deformations of abelian covers

By a recent result of Viehweg, projective manifolds with ample canonical class have a coarse moduli space, which is a union of quasiprojective varieties. In this paper, we prove that there are manifolds with ample canonical class that lie on arbitrarily many irreducible components of the moduli; moreover, for any finite abelian group $G$ there exist infinitely many components $M$ of the moduli of varieties with ample canonical class such that the generic automorphism group $G_M$ is equal to $G$. In order to construct the examples, we use abelian covers, i.e. Galois cover whose Galois group is finite and abelian. We prove two results about abelian covers: first, that if the building data are sufficiently ample, then the natural deformations surject on the Kuranishi family of $X$; second, that if the building data are sufficiently ample and generic, then $Aut(X)=G$.