Dr. Yelda Karadağ Şir is an academic specializing in Europeanization, EU neighborhood policies, foreign policy analysis, and regionalism in the post-Soviet space, with a particular focus on the South Caucasus and the Black Sea region. She holds a PhD in Area Studies from Middle East Technical University (METU), where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the institutional and ideational construction of Georgia’s Europeanization.
Between 2011 and 2020, Dr. Karadağ Şir was affiliated with METU’s Center for Black Sea and Central Asia (KORA), contributing to numerous national and international research projects. During this period, she conducted extensive fieldwork in Türkiye, Georgia, Bulgaria, Russia, and the United States.
She completed her postdoctoral research at Columbia University, Harriman Institute in New York between 2022 and 2023. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, including Geopolitics and Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, as well as by prominent academic publishers. Dr. Karadağ Şir has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at METU, Başkent University, and Final University, and is currently conducting research on regional connectivity and Turkey’s regional policy in the South Caucasus.