Professor in the Department of Sociology, he received his BA and MA from Boğaziçi University (1999 and 2001), and another MA and a PhD from the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) in Sociology (2005 and 2009). His areas of interest include Historical Sociology, Religion and Politics in the Middle East, Ottoman-Turkish Modernization, Social Theory, Historical-Comparative Methods, and Discourse and Genre Analyses. He has published 3 books (one titled Islam and the Politics of Secularism (London & New York, 2012), edited two books, and published peer-reviewed articles on these topics in such journals as Journal of Historical Sociology, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, IJMES, Asian Journal of Social Science, Journal of Humanity and Society, Turkish Studies Review, Divan: Disiplinlerarası Çalışmalar Dergisi, and Toplum ve Bilim.