Ercüment Asil is graduated from the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University. He completed his MA in 2005 at the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Boğaziçi University. In 2017 he earned his PhD degree at the University of Chicago's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department with his dissertation titled "The Pursuit of the Modern Mind: Popularization of Science, the Development of the Middle Classes, and Religious Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1860-1880". From 2012 to 2017, he worked at Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University, where he taught courses on Islamic and Ottoman history. He is interested in nineteenth century Ottoman modernization, specifically the popularization of modern sciences and their cultural impact in the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world.