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 Cinema, National Cinema, Critical Theory

Gerald Sim is on leave. After 3 months in the summer of 2016 as Visiting Senior Research Fellow funded by the Henry Luce Foundation at the Asia Research Institute, he spends the fall as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford. He is the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia for 2016-17.

My research in film studies is informed by historical materialism, and the humanists of the Frankfurt School in particular. I believe that its principles continue to hold great relevance to how we can understand a world so overdetermined by global capital, and critique a media culture so regulated by conglomerates and driven by commerce. I approach films with great emphasis on aesthetics and thus believe that textual analysis is invaluable and necessary. These principles guide my writing on a variety of topics in cinema and media studies, including national film historiography, digital cinematography, CNBC host Jim Cramer, film music theory, and my discipline's engagement with race. My book, The Subject of Film and Race, Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2014. My current project, which began recently with a Senior Visiting Research Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute in 2013, attempts to define a poetics for postcolonial cinema, and will try to expand views of how postcolonial history manifests itself in national cinemas by studying cultures that express it through film spatiality, sound, and genre.

I enjoy being complemented by colleagues in film studies at FAU who are united in the view that films are simultaneously aesthetic objects, products of the culture industry, as well as 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

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...