Gerald Sim

Gerald Sim joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center for the Autumn 2016 quarter from Florida Atlantic University's School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, where he is an associate professor of film and media studies. He arrived in Palo Alto immediately after a summer as Visiting Senior Research Fellow funded by the Luce Foundation, at the Asia Research Institute's Inter-Asia Engagements cluster in Singapore. It was his second stint at ARI; he was also a Fellow in the Cultural Studies cluster in 2013. During his time at Shorenstein APARC as Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, he will be researching and writing for his current book tentatively titled, Besides Hybridity: Postcolonial Poetics of Southeast Asian Cinema, contracted with Indiana University Press. The book uses the region's unique colonial history to conceive of postcolonial aesthetics beyond the usual tropes of hybridity and syncretism, while attending to an understudied but thriving segment of world cinema. Individual chapters explore Singapore's spatial imagination, Malaysian soundscapes, and Indonesian cinema's relationship to genre. Sim is the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), a Neo-Marxian evaluation of film studies' engagements with race. His other writing on diverse topics such as Japanese cinema, film music theory, Edward Said, digital cinematography, and CNBC personality Jim Cramer have been published in Asian Cinema, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Discourse, Projections, and Rethinking Marxism.  He holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa, and a BS in Biology from Duke.