Gerald Sim

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters

Communication and Multimedia Studies,

gsim@fau.edu

Boca Raton Campus

Gerald Sim is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, where he teaches critical studies courses across the Film, Video, and New Media curricular track. He returns to the classroom in the fall of 2017 after a year on successive research fellowships devoted to a monograph about postcolonial poetics in Southeast Asian cinema. The first award at the Asia Research Institute was funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. That was followed by the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship for Contemporary Southeast Asia in 2016-17. His first book, The Subject of Film and Race: Re-theorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2014. Both projects reflect an ongoing concern with the film medium’s complex intersections with the social and political subjectivities of marginalized Others. Sim has authored essays in journals such as Film Quarterly, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking Marxism, Discourse, Projections, Asian Cinema, and a forthcoming issue of positions: asia critique. His developing research agenda shifts to digital culture and new media, specifically the changes brought about by Big Data on media production and consumption. He is particularly interested in the media industries’ increasing reliance on information filtering and predictive analytics, and its consequences for our privacy, autonomy, social lives, and culture. A 2017 Faculty Fellow with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Sim holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from Iowa, and a B.S. in Biology from Duke.

Education
PhD, Film Studies, University of Iowa
BS, Biology, Duke University

Areas of Expertise: American and Postcolonial Cinema, Critical Theory, Film Sound and Music, New Media Studies, Algorithmic Culture

Courses
FIL 2000: Film Appreciation
FIL 3803: Film Theory
FIL 4843: Studies in Asian Cinema
COM 4332: Studies in New Media (Digital Infrastructures)
MMC 6715: Studies in New Media (Politics of AI)

About
Gerald Sim’s research and teaching is grounded in theoretically informed film and media studies. His writing appears in Television & New Media, 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.
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Professor Sim's new book, Screening Big Data: Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy , examines the influence of key films on public understandings of AI and the algorithmic systems that structure our digitally mediated lives. Foregrounding technopolitics with close readings of films like Moneyball, Minority Report, The Social Dilemma, and Coded Bias, he reveals compelling ways in which films and tech industry–adjacent media define apprehension of AI. His current research springs from some of Screening Big Data’s findings: studies of how techno-Orientalism frames the US-China AI arms race, and of AI’s incursion into media industries.

Sim’s second monograph, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability (2020) inaugurated 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 fashion a cartographic cinema, the import of Malay aural culture in the films of Yasmin Ahmad, and the persistence of stability discourse within the Indonesian investment in genre. The project was supported by two Visiting Senior Research Fellowships at the Asia Research Institute, and the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. Sim’s first book, The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic) was published in 2014.

(Photo by Rod Searcey)

Recent publications

"Shooting for a Revolution: Interview with Janus Metz," Film Quarterly 79, 2 (2025): 69-76.

“Techno-Orientalist Deflections: How Documentaries Frame China’s AI Threat,” in Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Forms and Formulations, edited by David Roh, Chris Fan, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu. (Rutgers University Press, 2025), 137-152.

"Silicon Valley's Human Shields," FLOW (April 23, 2025)

"Automated for the People," FLOW (December 18, 2024)

Screening Big Data: Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2024)

“Looking Out and on the Move: Aesthetics of Infrastructure in Recent Singapore Cinema,” in The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinema, edited by Zhang Zhen, Debashree Mukherjee, Intan Paramaditha, and Lee Sang Joon. (New York: Routledge, 2024), 202-211.

“Specific Alien Anonymities: National Identity within Any-Space-Whatevers,” in Is There Such a Thing as Singaporean Performance? edited by Sarah Weiss. Graz Studies in Ethnomusicology , Vol. 28. (Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria, 2023), 57-80.

"The Idea of Genre in the Algorithmic Cinema," Television & New Media 24, 5 (2023).

Postcolonial Hangups by Gerald Sim 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...