He is the author of Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African-American Culture Between the World Wars (2003), an award-winning cultural study of the relationship between jazz and industrialization. He is currently working on a cultural history of the concept of cool in American culture, The Origins of Cool: Jazz, Film Noir, and Existentialism in Postwar America (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press). In a related project, Dinerstein is a co-curator of a photography exhibit entitled American Cool at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. (Opening: March 2014.) He has also been a consultant on jazz and popular music for Putumayo Records, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the HBO serial drama, Boardwalk Empire. Dinerstein received his Ph.D. in American Studies from UT-Austin.