Dirlik received his undergraduate degree in engineering and came to the United States to study science at the University of Rochester, but developed an interest in Chinese history instead.

[4] His PhD dissertation on the origins of Marxist historiography in China, published by University of California Press in 1978,[5] led to an interest in Chinese anarchism.

[6] His closest academic collaborators included his mentor Harry Harootunian whom he befriended at Rochester,[7][8] Maurice Meisner,[7] and his partner Roxann Prazniak.

Dirlik served on the editorial boards of boundary 2, Interventions (UK), China Review (Hong Kong), Asian Studies Review (Australia), China Information (The Netherlands), China Scholarship (Beijing), Cultural Studies (Beijing), Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Taiwan and Singapore), Norwegian Journal of Migration Research, Asian Review of World Histories (South Korea), Research on Marxist Aesthetics (Nanjing), Register of Critical Theory of Society (Nanjing), International Critical Thought (Beijing), Pasaj (Passages in Literature) (Istanbul), and Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal (Malaysia).

[10] In his partner Roxann Prazniak's words, he "continued to the end to see Marxist historicism as the most compelling and comprehensive approach to understanding cultural entanglements in the political economy of global capitalism".

Reflections on Eurocentrism,"[note 1] Prasenjit Duara in 2001 replied to Dirlik's charge that diasporic scholars from the former British colonial world had used the concepts of "postcolonialism" to become embedded in Western academic "strongholds" and that they did not represent the majority of the population in their former countries.

Dirlik "overstated the problems and overgeneralized his critique," falling into the "trap of an originary fallacy," in which he "confuses origin with fate," assuming that historical scholarship must inevitably follow lines established at the foundation.