  In this brief note we give a brief overview of the comprehensive theory,
recently obtained by the author jointly with Johnson, Noble and Zumbrun, that
describes the nonlinear dynamics about spectrally stable periodic waves of
parabolic systems and announce parallel results for the linearized dynamics
near cnoidal waves of the Korteweg-de Vries equation. The latter are expected
to contribute to the development of a dispersive theory, still to come.
