Adam Smith

About

Adam Smith
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 returns to FAU after an eventful year as the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia for 2016-17. He spent the Fall Quarter of 2016 as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, then the following spring at the National University of Singapore. Before those postings, he completed a summer stint at the Asia Research Institute on a Visiting Senior Research Fellowship funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

In the coming semesters, through iterations of his classes on film theory and new media, he hopes to form a research agenda with conceptual filaments from earlier essays about digital culture, big data, and new media historiography.

“My thinking about film and media studies is informed by the historical materialism of the Frankfurt School, which continues 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 tend to place great emphasis on aesthetic form and believe that textual analysis is invaluable and necessary. These principles have guided my approach to a variety of topics in cinema and media studies, including national cinema, digital cinematography, financial media, film music, and race.

“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

“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). Subject of Film and Race

Adam Smith The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (2014) is the first comprehensive intervention into how film critics and scholars have sought to understand cinema's relationship to racial ideology. MORE...