José van Dijck graduated from Utrecht University in 1985 and received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1992. Van Dijck worked at the Universities of Groningen and Maastricht before she became a full professor at the University of Amsterdam in 2001. She served as Chair of the Department of Media Studies from 2002-2006, and was the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam between 2008 and 2012. From 2015 until 2018, she was the President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Van Dijck's visiting appointments include various universities in the USA, Australia and Canada, including Concordia University in Montreal (Canada), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge (USA); de University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) in Australie; Georgia Tech University in Atlanta (USA); de University of California, Santa Cruz (USCS); the Annenberg School of Communication van de University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia); and Stockholm University. In May 2019, she received an honorary doctorate from Lund University (Sweden). In 2021, she has been awarded the Spinoza Prize, the highest award in academic research in The Netherlands.