Bram Dijkstra is a professor of English literature. He joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego in 1966, and taught there until he retired and became an emeritus in 2000.

He is the author of seven books on literary and artistic subjects. These include:
Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (1969);
Georgia O'Keeffe and the Eros of Place (1998);
Expressionism in America (2001),
but he is probably best known for two books that have escaped the academic world into the world of popular culture:
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (1986); and
Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (1996):
books which discuss vamp imagery, femmes fatales, and similar threatening images of female sexuality in a number of works of literature and art. In comedian Steve Martin's short novel Shopgirl, Martin's heroine claims that Idols of Perversity is her favourite book.