Sam Dinger is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. He is a scholar of forced migration and masculinities in the contemporary MENA region, and he received his PhD in Sociology at New York University in 2025. His research looks at how young men navigate life transitions in exile, asking how displacement shapes their gendered aspirations, experiences of agency, and ethical repertoires.
His book project, No Country for Young Men: Masculinity and Migrant Futures in Lebanon, is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press. The book is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with a group of young Syrian men who came of age in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley. It focuses on how these men navigated a series of deeply destabilizing events: a late-2018 campaign to regularize the legal status of Syrian workers and the liquidity crisis that began the following year. It follows them as they search for an escape, a frenetic process involving research on social media, disagreements with friends and relatives, imagining lives in different places, and the labor of raising money, securing documents, and finding brokers and smugglers. By early 2021, only one remained in Lebanon, while the rest had scattered between Egypt, Libya, Greece, and Syria with stints in Sudan, Iraq, and Turkey. Following these trajectories, the book highlights the gendered pragmatics of imagining and achieving mobility between different contexts of refuge.
His articles have appeared in Ethnography, Humanity, and Contexts, and his writing has won awards from the ASA’s Global and Transnational (GATS), International Migration, and Human Rights sections, as well as the Association for the Anthropology of Policy. His fieldwork also received fellowship support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Max Weber Stiftung, the Harvard Center for Arabic Study Abroad, and the NYU Urban Democracy Lab.
For more on his writing and teaching, visit samueldinger.me