Bulliet grew up in Illinois. He attended Harvard, from which he received a B.A. in 1962 and a Ph.D. in 1967. He is the grandson of Clarence Joseph Bulliet, the art critic and journalist.

Several of his books focus on Iran but deal also with the larger Muslim world, including The Patricians of Nishapur: a Study in Medieval Islamic History (1972), Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (1979), and Islam: the View from the Edge (1994). His books on a broader view of Islamic history and society include Under Siege: Islam and Democracy (1994) and The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (2004). His book The Camel and the Wheel (1975) brings together his interest in the histories of technology, animal domestication, and the Middle East, dealing for example with the significant military advantage early Muslim armies gained from a slight improvement in the design of cloth camel saddles. He would return to the history of animal domestication with his Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships (2005).[1]

He is the writer and editor of books of more general interest as well, including The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century (editor, 1998), The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East (co-editor, 1996), and The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History (co-author, 1997). He has also written several novels which draw on his knowledge of international politics and the Middle East, and is a promoter of the validity of comics as an art form.

Bulliet's scholarship is known for innovative use of historical evidence and for radical questioning of the assumed roles that technology, religion, politics and animal domestication play in human society. Like any outspoken scholar of a subject as controversial as the Middle East, Bulliet has drawn fire from various sides in various continuing debates: criticism of his qualified support of the 1979 Iranian Revolution; criticism of his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as overly favoring the Palestinian cause; and the standard anti-Orientalist critique that as an Occidental scholar of Oriental societies, he cannot report on those societies without consigning them to the status of "Other."

Bulliet's current opinion pieces on the Middle East, as well as his latest writings on animal domestication and "post-domesticity," are syndicated by Agence Global.

According to an interview in Columbia magazine's Fall 2007 edition, Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger credits Bulliet with the idea for inviting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus on September 24, 2007. The engagement was highly controversial.