Greg Dening (1931 – 13 March 2008) was an Australian historian of the Pacific. Dening was 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.