Faculty

Profile

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

Degrees Held

PhD in Sociology, New York University, 2025

MA in Sociology, New York University, 2018

BS in International Politics and Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 2011

Recent Publications

“The sakan shababiyy, or the world improvised: masculinity, care, and the production of domestic space in exile.” Ethnography (2023) OnlineFirst. doi.org/10.1177/14661381221146988.

“Coordinating care and coercion: styles of sovereignty and the politics of humanitarian aid in Lebanon.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 13 no. 2 (2022), 218-239. doi:10.1353/hum.2022.0009.

“Dispossessing the displaced in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley.” Contexts 20 no. 1 (2021), 15-20. doi.org/10.1177/1536504221997862.

Research Interests

refugees and forced migration, masculinities, labor, humanitarianism, ethnography, Lebanon, Syria

Awards And Honors

Aristide Zolberg Distinguished Student Scholar Award, Honorable Mention, ASA International Migration (IM) Section, 2024

Graduate Student Paper Award, ASA Global and Transnational Sociology (GATS) Section, 2024

Graduate Student Paper Award, The Association for the Anthropology of Policy, 2023

Graduate Student Paper Award, ASA Human Rights Section, 2023

Dean’s Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award in the Social Sciences, NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2022