Configuration Spaces and the Topology of Curves in Projective Space

We survey and expand on the work of Segal, Milgram and the author on the topology of spaces of maps of positive genus curves into $n$-th complex projective space, $n\ge 1$ (in both the holomorphic and continuous categories). Both based and unbased maps are studied and in particular we compute the fundamental groups of the spaces in question. The relevant case when $n=1$ is given by a non-trivial extension which we fully determine.