Cagaptay received a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 2003. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Turkish nationalism. Besides English and Turkish, his research languages include French, German, Spanish, Bosnian, Hebrew, Azerbaijani, and Ottoman Turkish.
Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Teaching
A historian by training, Dr. Cagaptay wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale University 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. He was a visiting professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has also served on contract as chair of the Turkey Advanced Area Studies Program at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute.
Honors
Dr. Cagaptay is the recipient of numerous honors, grants, and chairs, among them the Smith-Richardson, Mellon, Rice, and Leylan fellowships, as well as the Ertegun chair at Princeton. 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. He is the author of four books on modern Turkey: Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Turkey: Who is a Turk ; The Rise of Turkey: 21st Century’s First Muslim Power ; and The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey ; Erdogan's Empire: Turkey and the Middle East.
In the media
Cagaptay has written extensively on Turkey–United States relations; Turkish domestic politics; Turkish nationalism; Turkey's rise as an economic power and Ankara's Middle East policy, publishing in scholarly journals and major international print media. These include the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Times, International Herald Tribune, Jane's Defence Weekly, and Habertürk. He is a regular columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey's oldest and most influential English-language paper, and a contributor to CNN's Global Public Square blog. He appears regularly on Fox News, CNN, NPR, al-Jazeera, BBC, and CNN-Turk. His latest book, “Erdogan's Empire: Turkey and the Politics of the Middle East” was published in September 2019 by I.B. Tauris.
