Born in Geneva in 1960, Edhem Eldem spent most of his secondary education in French lycées abroad. After earning a bachelor's and master's degree in political science at Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) University, Istanbul, he turned to Ottoman history. In 1989, he defended his doctoral thesis on French trade in Istanbul in the ^18th century at the University of Provence, under the supervision of Robert Mantran. A researcher at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul, he began his academic career in 1989 in the History Department of the University of Boğaziçi. Lecturer in 1991, he has been a university professor at the same institution since 1998. Visiting professor at Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, EHESS, EPHE and ENS, fellow at Berlin's Wissenschaftskolleg, in 2017 he was elected to an international chair at the Collège de France entitled " Turkish and Ottoman History ". He was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2022.

A specialist in the last two centuries of the Ottoman Empire, his research and publications have focused on Levantine trade, Muslim funerary epigraphy, the history of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, the history of archaeology and photography in the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul during the long ^19th century, Westernization and Orientalism, the cultural elite of the late Empire and (auto)biographical sources from this period.