Deno John Geanakoplos () was a renowned scholar of Byzantine cultural and religious history and Italian Renaissance intellectual history and the Bradford Durfee Professor Emeritus of Byzantine History, Renaissance History, and Eastern Orthodox Church History at Yale University. He was the author of 13 books and over 100 articles and was considered one of the foremost Byzantine scholars in the world. He was the father of Yale Economist and Professor John Geanakoplos. Early life and education Geanakoplos was born in 1916 in Minneapolis, Minnesota to parents of Greek ancestry. He studied music before becoming a historian. He earned a diploma in violin from the Juilliard School of Music in 1939 and then played in the first violin section in the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra under Dimitri Mitropoulos. Simultaneously, he pursued a B.A. in history from the University of Minnesota, receiving it in 1941. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army with a school friend, Sydney Ahlstrom, both of whom eventually became history professors at Yale. Geanakoplos was sent to North Africa, where he learned French, and then was in the first wave of American soldiers to reach Sicily, where he learned Italian. Becoming increasingly interested in Italian culture, he managed to enroll and complete the Dottore in lettere at the University of Pisa in 1946, writing his dissertation in Italian. Leaving the Army as a captain, he returned to the symphony and the University of Minnesota, where he was awarded an M.A. in 1946. He enrolled in the Graduate School of Harvard University in 1947, completing his Ph.D. in history in 1953, meanwhile serving as concertmaster of the Harvard-Radcliffe Symphony Orchestra. Career Professor Geanakoplos’s first teaching positions were at Brandeis University and at the Greek Theological Seminary in Boston. From 1954 to 1967, he taught medieval history at the University of Illinois, before joining the faculty at Yale, where he remained until his retirement in 1987. After his son John joined the Yale economics faculty in 1980, they became only the third father-son pair to be tenured professors concurrently in the university’s history. Deno Geanakoplos was elected president of the American Society of Church History in 1983 and was a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Historical Association and the Renaissance Society of America. In 1975 he was awarded the title of Archon “Teacher of the People” by the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople.