Soner Cagaptay, PhD 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, publishing in scholarly journals and major international print media, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Atlantic. He appears regularly on CNN, PBS, NPR, and BBC.

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. He has also served on contract as chair of the Turkey Advanced Area Studies Program at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute. He is the author of "The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century's First Muslim Power," "The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey," and "Erdogan's Empire: Turkey and the Politics of the Middle East".

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His latest book, "A Sultan in Autumn: Erdogan Faces Turkey's Uncontainable Forces" was published in June 2021 by I.B. Tauris.