Gerald Sim

About

Gerald Sim
PhD, Film Studies, University of Iowa
BS, Biology, Duke

Email: gsim@fau.edu
Phone: (561) 297-2050
Areas of Expertise: American and Postcolonial Cinema, Critical Theory,
Digital Cultures

Gerald Sim’s research and teaching is grounded in theoretically informed film and media studies. His publications span postcolonial cinema, digital culture, financial media, film music, and race.

In the coming semesters, through classes on film theory and new media, his research turns to data studies. He is particularly interested in how data epistemologies determine the limits of our political agency. The project originates from earlier essays about digital culture and new media historiography. He is currently thinking about cultural representations and metaphors of Big Data as a way to understand datafication and its place in the public imagination.

He returned to FAU in Fall’17 after a pair of external postings as the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia for 2016-17. He spent the Fall Quarter of 2016 as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, then the following spring at the National University of Singapore. Before those stints, he completed a summer stint at the Asia Research Institute on a Visiting Senior Research Fellowship funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Prof. Sim writes: “My theoretical approach to film and media studies is informed by the historical materialism of the Frankfurt School, which continues to say a lot about how we understand a media culture so regulated by conglomerates and driven by commerce. I also pay attention to aesthetic form and believe in textual analysis. It guides my approach to a variety of topics in cinema and media studies. Those interests have moved around quite a bit. The essay that I enjoyed writing the most was about CNBC’s host of “Mad Money” Jim Cramer."

“I enjoy being complemented by colleagues in film studies at FAU who are united in the view that media texts are simultaneously aesthetic objects, products of the culture industry, and instruments of social change. I am also reminded at every faculty colloquium and hallway chat of how our intellectual community – based in a place like Boca Raton, no less – is enlivened by the diversity of our individual interests.”

(Photo by Rod Searcey)

Recent Publications

“Postcolonial Cacophonies: Yasmin Ahmad’s Sense of the World,” positions: asia critique 26, 3 (2018): 389-421.

“Individual Disruptors and Economic Gamechangers: Netflix, New Media, and Neoliberalism,” in The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century, edited by Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

"Race and the Cinematic “Machine”," in The Routledge Companion to Media and Race, edited by Christopher P. Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2016).

The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema is the first comprehensive intervention into how film critics and scholars have sought to understand cinema's relationship to racial ideology. MORE...