CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – As part of the ongoing PeayClipse lecture series, Austin Peay State University faculty members Tim and Mary Winters will present a talk titled, “Telling Time and Telling Tales: Eclipses in Ancient Greece,” at 7 p.m. on July 15, during the city of Clarksville’s Movies in the Park Series, at Heritage Park. They will talk before that evening’s featured film, “Finding Dory.”
The talk will survey how the ancient Greeks (and Romans) regarded the spectacular and mysterious phenomena of eclipses. Not only have the hundreds of reports of eclipses by ancient writers proven extremely useful to modern scholars in pinning down reliable dates for historical events, but the literature shows that the ancients themselves tempered their superstitious awe of these events with a strong streak of rationality that laid the foundations of Western science.
The Winters’ talk is the second in a series of events promoting the upcoming Total American Eclipse, which will occur Aug. 21, with Clarksville being one of the cities nearest to the point of greatest eclipse. Austin Peay is celebrating the phenomenon with a series of educational events surrounding the eclipse, coined as the PeayClipse.
During each Movies in the Park event, APSU will sponsor a booth staffed with Eclipse Educators who will be offering solar viewing glasses and special commemorative educational books about the eclipse, along with schedules, eclipse information and safety tips for viewing. The University is offering this in partnership with the city of Clarksville and Montgomery County as a community educational outreach and to inform the community about events which will be held in the Dunn Center and Forterra Stadium on the day of eclipse. For details, please visit apsu.edu/eclipse.
About the presenters:
Dr. Tim Winters received his B.A. in Greek at the University of Arizona, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Classics at The Ohio State University. He spent two years at The American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, studying archaeology, and participated in excavations there. Dr. Winters taught at Brigham Young University, Duquesne and Vanderbilt before coming to Austin Peay in 1997, where he directs the Greek and Latin majors.
Mary Winters received her B.A. in English and Classics at the University of Arizona, and her M.A. in English, with additional graduate work in Classics, from The Ohio State University. She taught high school Latin and English for many years, most recently at Clarksville Academy. In 2010 she became a full-time instructor at Austin Peay, where she teaches courses in Latin, world literature, etymology and classical civilization.
