Professor Dienst is the author of:
— Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Duke University Press, 1994), an account of television from the perspectives of cultural studies, Marxist political economy, Heidegger's philosophy, Derrida's deconstruction, and Deleuze's cinema theory.
— The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good (Verso Books, 2011), an analysis of indebtedness as a fundamental condition of contemporary social, political, and economic life.
— Seeing from Scratch: 15 Lessons with Godard (Caboose Books, 2020), an exploration of visual pedagogy based on the work of Jean-Luc Godard.
He is also the co-editor (with Henry Schwarz) of Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies (Westview Press, 1996), a collection of essays on cultural politics in an era of globalization.
He has published a series of essays on contemporary theory, visual media, and political discourse in a variety of journal and anthologies.
Occasional pieces can found on two blogs:
http://bondsofdebt.wordpress.com/
http://thinkingthroughimages.wordpress.com/