Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. He has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism. He regularly publishes in scholarly journals and major international print media, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Atlantic. He frequently appears on Aljazeera, BBC, CNN, and NPR.  

A historian by training, Dr. Cagaptay wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale University (2003) on Turkish nationalism. Dr. Cagaptay has taught courses at Yale, Princeton University, Georgetown University, and Smith College on the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. His spring 2003 course on modern Turkish history was the first offered by Yale in three decades. From 2006-2007, he was Ertegun Professor at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Dr. Cagaptay is the recipient of numerous honors, grants, and chairs, among them the Smith-Richardson, Mellon, Rice, and Leylan fellowships. He has also served on contract as chair of the Turkey Advanced Area Studies Program at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. In 2012, he was named an American Turkish Society Young Society Leader.

Dr. Cagaptay has published several highly acclaimed books on Turkish nationalism and politics. His first book was a published version of his doctoral dissertation on Turkish nationalism in 2006. This was followed by “The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century’s First Muslim Power” published in 2014 and, most recently, a definitive work detailing the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey“.

After training in India, Dr. Cagaptay is certified as a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) 200 in 2018.