She was a professor of English at Brooklyn College]from 1958 to 1966, and then lived in
Lagos, Nigeria, until 1969, doing work for the
Nigerian National Museum and studying
Hausa poetry. Starting in 1970 she was a professor of English at Bronx Community College. Fluent in German, Italian, and French, Dydo was editor of
Odyssey Review: A Quarterly of Modern Latin American & European Literature in English Translation from 1961 to 1963. By the 1970s, Dydo turned to
Gertrude Stein, whose work would be at the center of her research and writing for the rest of her life. She worked closely with
Leon Katz,
Bill Rice and Edward Burns. With Burns, she edited
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (1996). In 1993 she published
A Stein Reader, notable both for the selections and the illuminating headnotes. Because of Dydo's extensive research on the Stein papers at the
Beinecke Library (Yale University), she was able to provide detailed
textual scholarship about individual Stein works, such as had not been previously available. The years of study culminated in Dydo's major work,
Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises 1923–1934, published in 2003. Her later work turned to the poetry of
Cecil Taylor. She died in New York City in 2017, at age 92. ==Personal life==