Professor Dienst is the author of Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (1994) and co-editor of Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies (1996). He has published a series of essays on visual media, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean-Luc Godard in various journals and anthologies, including the Journal of Visual Culture and New Media / Old Media (2006).
For the past several years, he has been working on two different projects. The first, The Bonds of Debt, elaborates a concept of indebtedness in the context of globalization, the financial crisis, and the exploration of new forms of collectivity. The second, Remains to be Seen, offers a series of lessons concerning the materiality of visual media, aimed at new practices of image-making and cultural activism.