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.