Uli Schamiloglu received his B.A. in Middle East Languages and Cultures from Columbia College in 1979 and his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Central Asian History from Columbia University in 1986. In 2007 he was made Doctor honoris causa by the Tatar State University of Humanities and Education (Kazan). In 2008 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan.

Uli Schamiloglu has taught at Indiana University (1983-1989) and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989-2017), where he was Professor of Turkic and Central Eurasian Studies. He also served as chair of the Central Asian Studies Program and the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also directed the Central Eurasian Studies Summer Institute (2011-2017). He has also served as president of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages (2003-2017).

Since 2017 Uli Schamiloglu has been Professor and chair of the Department of Kazakh Language and Turkic Studies at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan.

His main research interests include the history of the Turkic languages and cultures of the Middle East and Central Eurasia, the socio-economic history of the Middle East and Central Eurasia in the medieval period, the history of Turko-Islamic civilization, and modern intellectual movements among the Muslim Turkic peoples of the Ottoman and Russian Empires.

Since the late 1980s Professor Schamiloglu has also been interested in the role of the Black Death (14th century on) in the history of medieval Central Eurasia, especially its role in the history of the Golden Horde and the other states of the Mongol World Empire, including the impact of plague on the history of literary languages, religiosity, and written monuments. More recently he has also begun to work on the Plague in the Time of Justinian (6th-8th centuries) in Central Eurasian history as well.