Cindy Weinstein's work is informed by the notion that literature and the interpretive tools of literary criticism contribute to an understanding of the world outside of literature. Each of her three monographs appears in Cambridge University Press's prestigious Studies in American Literature and Culture Series, and examines the sometimes overlapping, sometimes divergent relation between literary and cultural representations of particular themes. Her first book analyzed this dynamic with respect to labor; her second focused on family; and her third on temporality. Taken together, these books cover a range of canonical and non-canonical authors, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to E.D.E.N. Southworth and Caroline Lee Hentz. In addition to writing these monographs on American literature, which take up literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, she has edited and co-edited volumes on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, twentieth-century American fiction, aesthetics, and temporality. Weinstein's articles have appeared in top journals in literary criticism, including American Literature, ELH, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction.

Her forthcoming book, Finding the Right Words: A Story of Literature, Grief, and the Brain written with Dr. Bruce Miller, is a memoir about her life as an English professor and daughter whose father suffered from early-onset Alzheimer's. She received a fellowship from the Global Brain Health Institute at UC San Francisco for this project, and she spent a year taking classes on neurology, attending seminars on caregiving, and shadowing physicians, during which time she also studied the memoir genre.

She is currently working on a book called "Poe And," which analyzes the profound influence Poe's work has had on novelists, painters, and poets. Her essay on Poe and Nabokov appeared in Thomas M. Allen's edited volume, Time and Literature, and another essay on Poe and Magritte is forthcoming in Poe Studies. She has begun the research for a third chapter about the influence of Poe on the Beat poets.