Greg Dening

Who was Greg Dening?

Greg Dening was an Australian historian of the Pacific.

Dening born in Newcastle, New South Wales. He was educated at two Jesuit schools, St. Louis School in Perth and Xavier College in Melbourne. He received an MA from the University of Melbourne and a PhD from Harvard University, where his doctoral dissertation was a historical ethnography of the Marquesas Islands. From the late 1960s he became the centre of an ethnographic history school called the 'Melbourne Group'. He taught sociology and history at La Trobe University, Melbourne and one semester of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i before being appointed Max Crawford Professor of History at the University of Melbourne in 1971.

As Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, he was one of Australia's most eminent historians, and one of the preeminent historians and anthropologists of the South Pacific. From 1998 to 2004 he taught ten day graduate workshops at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University, Canberra. He died on 13 March 2008 in Hobart. Vanessa Smith of the University of Sydney spoke of "...his unique gift as a historian, unobtrusively demonstrating that the most acute critical perception is not incommensurate with the deepest appreciation of his subjects’ human circumstances."