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 writing appears in Convergence, positions, Discourse, Rethinking Marxism, Projections, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Cinema, and Film Quarterly. They include essays about data Platonism in Moneyball, Netflix’s data operations and its place in media history, CNBC personality Jim Cramer’s Marxist investment advice, Edward Said’s influence on film studies, film music theory, and cinema’s transition to digital cinematography.

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability (2020) is Sim’s second monograph. It inaugurates the Critical Asian Cinemas series at Amsterdam University Press. The book reveals how the region’s unique postcoloniality manifests stylistically in films, including the way that Singapore's spatial preoccupations fashions a cartographic cinema, the import of Malay aural culture in the films of Yasmin Ahmad, and the persistence of stability discourse in the Indonesian investment in genre. The research was supported by Visiting Senior Research Fellowships at the Asia Research Institute supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. Sim published The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury) in 2014.

He is currently interested in how data epistemologies determine political agency. His work-in-progress examines the relationship between film culture and public imaginings of datafication. It includes studies of how iconic films have come to function within the cultural infrastructures of technological literacy.

He leads a graduate seminar on Ethics and Politics of AI in the Fall 2020 semester.

(Photo by Rod Searcey)

Recent Publications

Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability (2020) 

“ ‘How can you not be romantic about baseball?’ Or how we are platonic about data.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2020).

“Postcolonial Cacophonies: Yasmin Ahmad’s Sense of the World,” in 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...

"Social Justice and Cinema," in Routledge International Handbook of Social Justice, edited by Michael Reisch (London: Routledge, 2014), 502-12.

"The Other Person in the Bathroom: Mixed Emotions about Cognitivist Film Music Theory," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 30.4 (2012): 309-322.

"Jim Cramer's Mad Money: Disavowals of a Late Capitalist Investor," Rethinking Marxism 24.2 (2012): 307-316.

"When and Where is the Digital Revolution in Cinematography?" Projections 6.1 (2012): 79-100.

Festival reports from the very excellent True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri, for Framework (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010).

"Said's Marxism: Orientalism's Relationship to Film Studies and Race." Discourse 34.2 (2012): 240-262.