Emeritus Profiles
Dienst, Richard
- Richard Dienst
- Professor of English
- At Rutgers Since: 1999
- Retired Since: 2022
- rdnst@rutgers.edu
- Office: 43 Mine Street, Room 102, College Ave Campus
- Office Hours:
Please contact me to schedule a meeting.
- Primary Areas of Specialization: Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
- Field of Interest: Theory
- About:
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/
- Book(s):
- Undergraduate Courses Taught:
- History of Literary Theory (Parts 1 and 2)
- Literary and Scientific Writings
- Theories of Text and Image
- Utopia
- Thinking as a Way of Life
- Science Fiction
- Introduction to Crime Fiction
- Awards:
2020: Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching
2015: SAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education
- Other Publications:
- "Debt and Utopia" https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3401-debt-and-utopia
- Education: PhD, Duke UniversityBA, University of California, Berkeley
