The Encampments: Screening and Discussion

Proof of registration, via a QR code on your phone or on paper, will be required to enter Reid Hall. Entry will be refused to those who are not registered.

Following a screening of the documentary film The Encampments, Joseph A. Howley—scholar of ancient media and book history at Columbia University and Fellow at the Institute—will moderate a conversation between  Seth Anziska, the Mohamed S. Farsi-Lindenbaum Associate Professor of Jewish-Muslim Relations at University College London, Nina Berman, documentary photographer, filmmaker, journalist, professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Fellow at the Institute and Jennifer C. Lena, professor of Arts Administration at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

The Encampments is a 2025 American documentary film directed and produced by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker. It chronicles the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University and the wider wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests during the Gaza war and humanitarian crisis. The film is executively produced by Macklemore and distributed by Watermelon Pictures.

Seth Anziska is the Mohamed S. Farsi-Lindenbaum Professor of Jewish-Muslim Relations at UCL, where he is the founding director of the Middle East Research Centre. His research and teaching focuses on modern Middle Eastern history, Israeli and Palestinian society and culture, and contemporary Arab and Jewish politics. He is the author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton University Press, 2018; Arabic edition, Institute for Palestine Studies, 2022), which was awarded the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies Book Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Jewish Currents, +972 Magazine, and the 55th Venice Biennale.

Nina Berman is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, journalist, and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work looks at war, militarism, trauma, and environmental justice. She is a 2025 Guggenheim fellow, the author of three books, and is represented in numerous public collections including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Smithsonian.

Joseph A. Howley holds an MLitt in Ancient History and a PhD in Classics from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and previously studied at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on the intellectual and media cultures of the Roman world and the history of the book. He has taught at Columbia University since 2011 and, since 2016, has been a Senior Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Society for Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School. In 2025–2026, he will serve as President of the Society.

Jennifer C. Lena is Associate Professor of Arts Administration at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is an expert on artistic labor and cultural categories, and is the author of Banding Together (Princeton University Press, 2012), Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts (Princeton University Press, 2019), Measuring Culture (Columbia University Press, 2020). From 2017-19, Lena was the PI on a U.S. Department of State research project mapping arts capacity in the Occupied Territories.

This event is co-organized by Joseph A. Howley and Mahdi Fleifel, and is co-sponsored by both the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and the Columbia Global Paris Center

This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.