Gerald Sim

Email: gsim@fredrimonta.com

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

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 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.

Book Talks and Interviews

Interview about Screening Big Data with Miranda Melcher for New Books Network (October 2024)

Interview about postcolonial statuary

Book talk with the University of Washington

Book talk with the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Seminars Convened
Critical Conversations - How Political Celebrities Spread Disinformation with Becca Lewis

Critical Conversations - Data Abolition for Fair Work with Veena Dubal