Deno John Geanakoplos was an American 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.
12 Facts About Deno Geanakoplos
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Deno Geanakoplos was the author of 13 books and over 100 articles and was considered one of the foremost Byzantine scholars in the world.
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Deno Geanakoplos was the father of Yale Economist and Professor John Geanakoplos.
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Deno Geanakoplos 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.
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Deno 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.
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Deno Geanakoplos enrolled in the Graduate School of Harvard University in 1947, completing his Ph.
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Professor Deno Geanakoplos's first teaching positions were at Brandeis University and at the Greek Theological Seminary in Boston.
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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.
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Deno Geanakoplos's research showed the pivotal role that Byzantine scholars who emigrated to Italy played in unlocking and interpreting ancient Greek texts vital to the Italian Renaissance, systematically documenting their interactions in the West.
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Deno Geanakoplos deeply probed the encounters between the Greek and Roman churches over centuries of recurring schism and attempted reunion, including the Councils of Lyons, Basel and especially Florence, during which the churches agreed to reconcile.
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Deno Geanakoplos was married to Effie Geanakoplos, a clinical social worker and instructor in psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center, for 48 years.
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Deno Geanakoplos's daughter Constance is a concert pianist in New York.