Abstract
This paper argues that Nauru’s transformation from a resource-rich Pacific island to an ecologically devastated and politically dependent nation exemplifies the entanglement of neoliberalism, racialization, and as frameworks for cycles of marginalization. Through an examination of news articles and scholarly research, this paper provides a historical and contemporary analysis of colonial phosphate mining, post-independence economic collapse, and Australia’s offshore refugee detention regime. Extractive logics have left Nauru environmentally ruined, socially fragmented, and economically tethered to the very powers responsible for its exploitation. By situating Nauru within broader Global North-Global South dynamics, this paper posits that Nauru is an example case demonstrating patterns through which wealthy states externalize environmental, political, and humanitarian burdens onto marginalized communities. Drawing on environmental justice frameworks, this paper shows how colonial legacies perpetuate procedural exclusion and disproportionate exposure to climate risk. Nauru’s history and trajectory have significant implications for sustainable development, illustrating how unsustainable extractive economies reproduce themselves through new forms of exploitation while highlighting the necessity of development models grounded in environmental justice, Indigenous self-determination, and equitable global governance. Ultimately, the case of Nauru underscores the challenges to successful sustainable development without dismantling the extractive and racialized systems that create environmental vulnerability in the first place.
Author’s Note
I became acutely aware of Nauru’s economic rise and fall after studying at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Professor Hope Ashiabor, the lecturer for UNSW’s Environmental Sustainability and Taxation course, cited Nauru as a prime example of how ecological motivations influenced by colonial structures and practices can lead to economic and ecological devastation. Studying in Australia offered me a unique opportunity to learn about how Australians view and learn about Australia as a colonial power. With my interest piqued by my studies of Australia’s economic motivations and its position to exercise control over Global South economies and wealth, I wanted to explore Nauru. The frameworks for global environmental justice discussed in Professor Kemi Fuentes-George’s Global Environmental Justice class in the Political Science department at Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT 05753) provided me with the perfect opportunity to research Nauru and enhance my understanding of its exploitation. Thank you to Professor Fuentes-George for the opportunity to pursue this topic.
Introduction
The conversion of Nauru from a resource-rich colony to a politically and economically dependent nation reveals how neoliberalism, racialization, and extractivism function as interconnected frameworks and mechanisms. The historic extraction of phosphate from Nauru (and resultant environmental degradation) in conjunction with Nauru’s role in Australian border control outsourcing and refugee detention reveal postcolonial inequities sustained by neoliberal governance. These processes have left Nauru ecologically devastated, economically dependent, and environmentally vulnerable while simultaneously racializing and “othering” both Indigenous Nauruans and asylum seekers exiled to the remote Pacific island as marginalized expendable bodies. Nauru serves as a case study of how the Global North exploits the Global South and as a prime example of postcolonial inequities; the nation is a victim of environmental vulnerability caused by extraction and exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change.
History of Colonization
The Republic of Nauru has been deeply shaped – socially, economically, and politically – by legacies of colonialism. Understanding the colonization and eventual nation-building process of the modern Republic is critical to understanding how it fell victim to neoliberal governance and exploitation by extractive practices. Nauru’s Indigenous people, composed of 12 tribes that were once the basis of the Indigenous political system, are called Nauruans and are believed to be of Microneisan, Polynesian, and Melanesian descent (The Government of the Republic of Nauru, 2025). Due to Nauru’s colonial history and its subjection to Australian policies, Nauru is socially dictated by racialized hierarchies. Nauru’s reliance on Australia for economic viability has resulted in its role as an Australian offshore detention center. Beginning in an official capacity in 2012, Australia started sending asylum seekers to Nauru; the process essentially treats refugees and asylum seekers “as commodities who can be shipped like goods from country to country” (Bhagat and LeBaron, 2024). Australian practices of shipping human beings to Nauru racializes Nauru. Refugees seeking asylum in Australia are othered and seen as “potential threats to state security” or as suffering injustices once they have been removed from Australia, while Indigenous Nauruans are portrayed in media sources as savage islanders in charge of refugee governance once those refugees are exported to Nauru (Bhagat, 2024). The trope of Indigenous peoples as savages stems directly from European colonialism and the view of non-Western practices as uncivilized and less than human. Nauruans are no exception to this trend. Germany first colonized Nauru in 1888, and the Pacific island remained a German colony until World War I (Federal Foreign Office, 2025). Australian forces occupied Nauru during World War I, and in 1920 the island “became a mandated territory within the framework of the League of Nations” under the joint authority of Australia, Great Britain, and New Zealand (Foster and Kiste, 2025). Following many years of Australian administration, Nauru officially gained independence from Australia in 1968 (Foster and Kiste, 2025). Irrespective of its newly independent governmental structure, Nauru remained and continues to remain heavily tied to Australia and is dependent on it for economic sustenance. This dependency parallels the model that Professor Catejan Iheka discusses in African Ecomedia with respect to Niger and France. Iheka writes, “Niger’s independence from France has meant little, as the country’s relationship with the French company running the Somair and Cominack mines remains lopsided and exploitative” (Iheka, 2021, p141). While Nauru is an independent nation, it lacks economic and military independence; it holds diplomatic power but is generally subject to Australian policies –especially revolving around immigration to Australia and the expulsion of people to detention centers in Nauru – for revenue as a result of its ecological devastation and resource depletion.
The Depletion of Nauru’s Ecosystem and the Phosphate Curse
One of the smallest nations in the world, Nauru is a coral atoll upon which dense jungle vegetation once grew (Ludewig, 2024). Naturally receding sea levels led to the dolomitization of the coral, creating limestone pinnacles filled with organic matter over geologic timescales. These pinnacles became rock phosphate deposits covered in jungle. Ecologically, Nauru is positioned in the migratory path of many bird species but houses no predators to those birds, resulting in a build-up of bird guano that is rich in phosphate and generates the deposits (Mulko, 2023). Nauru’s ecology made it a prime location for colonial neoliberal exploitation.
Though colonization began with Germany in the 1880s, the intense resource extraction that entirely depleted Nauru was incited by the British. In 1900, Albert Ellis of the London-based Pacific Islands Company discovered Nauru’s phosphate deposits, leading to the company’s liquidation and reformation as the Pacific Phosphate Company in 1902 (Ludewig, 2024). By 1912, nearly 300,000 tons of phosphate had been extracted from Nauru and Banaba (another atoll in the Pacific) for export to Australia and New Zealand (Ludewig, 2024). As Professor Audra Mitchell, Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology at Wilfrid Laurier University, outlines, a fundamental function of extraction, a cornerstone of capitalism, “is to break co-constituted bodies into entities or substances that can be commodified” (Mitchell, 2024, p142). Extraction derives value from an isolated product, but extractive processes are often tied to greater tools of exploitation and dominion. Colonialism tends to occur when the process of extraction (for example, phosphate from an island nation) becomes connected to then sellingthose extracted resources for a product, the profits of which the producer nation does not reap. Nauruans did not benefit from the mining of their island’s phosphate due to the Global North-Global South political economy that enables extractive powers to benefit from exploitation. Ali Bhagat, in a book review of Julia Morris’s Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru, explains how “the political economy of a small island state is inseparable from global capitalism” (Bhagat, 2024). The Pacific Phosphate Company exemplifies the capitalist motivations of colonists. Ludewig describes how “the Company presented a paradigmatic example of Greater British enterprise in the Western Pacific, combining capital and expertise drawn from throughout England, Australia, and New Zealand to realize the value of Pacific commodities within the markets of industrial capitalism” (Ludewig, 2024). The Pacific Phosphate Company’s actions in Nauru embody the structural dynamics of the British imperial economy and demonstrate the “phosphate curse” that led to the depletion of Nauru’s ecosystem. What happened in Nauru is a prime example of what Mitchell characterizes as “extraction to the point of exhaustion” (Mitchell, 2024, p123). The “exhaustion” to which Mitchell refers is epitomized in Nauru’s ecological devastation.
Nauruan Governmental Dynamics
Nauru is often classified colloquially by Australians as a Banana Republic: during the 20th century, the country had no independent income and was entirely dependent upon a single export (phosphate) for economic viability (Ashiabor, 2025). Today, Nauru relies on the Australian government and on Australian corporations for its survival. Nauru’s phosphate deposits were nearly totally depleted in the 1960s, right around the time that the nation gained its independence from Australia. Australia granting independence to Nauru at near total resourceexhaustion and with economic collapse brewing emphasizes the colonial nature of Australia’s engagement with Nauru and its people. About 80% of Nauru’s surface was devastated by strip mining; an uninhabitable “wasteland of jagged limestone and no fertile land” remains (Mulko, 2023). The Australian government, recognizing its role in destroying Nauru and knowing that the nation was not set to be economically independent, offered to relocate the entire population in the 1960s (Mulko, 2023). However, Nauruans chose to pursue sovereignty from Australian governance instead, owing in part to their historical cultural connections to the land. Nauru had a bubble of wealth when it first gained economic sovereignty, but soon after establishing an independent government, the economy collapsed. In 1970, Nauruans first gained control of their phosphate exports and were able to profit from the remaining deposits. Some money went to private landowners, while some profit was utilized by the state to invest in healthcare, education, and infrastructure (Mulko, 2023). However, profits came solely from phosphate exports, and once the reserves were depleted, so too was the source of income on which people had come to rely—hence the conundrum of the Banana Republic.
I. Life in Nauru
Under extractive colonial governance from countries such as Australia and New Zealand, Nauru’s phosphate deposits were nearly depleted, and people became more accustomed to relying on imported goods for basic survival needs. The loss of arable land in Nauru due to extractive practices eliminated Nauruans’ capacity for agriculture and self-sustenance. The exploitation of Nauru’s once fertile ecosystems led to mass consumption of foods imported from Western nations; this shift in diet has had lasting effects on public health, including high rates of obesity and type two diabetes (Mulko, 2023). Further, the loss of arable land in Nauru in tandem with its remote location have resulted in islanders relying not only on imported goods butparticularly on packaged and processed foods, since they are easier and cheaper to transport (Mulko, 2023). Furthermore, as a direct consequence of phosphate extraction, mines create dust and produce large amounts of radioactive waste that can negatively impact public health and drastically diminish air quality. Accordingly, public health in Nauru has been affected by both the processes of mining phosphate and the ways in which extractive governance shaped society into relying on imported goods. Once one of the world’s richest countries per capita, Nauru is now economically devastated and entirely dependent on Australia, a government that continues to exploit its position of power over Nauru. The colonial restructuring of Nauru, originally manifested through phosphate extraction, has resulted in the country’s imperial dependence.
Nauru Post-Independence
Resource economics and neoliberalism have shaped modern day Nauru. Resource economics in Nauru can be understood as how the natural endowments of the country have shaped its economic outcomes. Critically, the use of extractivism and targeted racialization (the process of assigning socially constructed racial identities to categorize and marginalize people based on appearance or perceived characteristics) have inhibited the modern state’s ability to recover from the mismanagement of a finite natural resource – phosphate – that once produced rapid prosperity (Ashiabor, 2025). At the same time, the combined effects of governmental management and climate change continue to impact Nauru. Since “financial viability has been a pressing problem since the exhaustion of [Nauru’s] rich phosphate deposits,” the government of Nauru, after gaining independence, began its operation within a system of structural power imbalances (Davies and Doherty, 2018). Morris explains that “Countries with postcolonial ties around forms of extraction have all-too-frequently found themselves tied into patterns ofimperial dependency,” and Nauru is a prime example (Morris, 2020, p63). Unfortunately, “a series of corrupt and incompetent governments found extravagant and spectacular ways to lose the country’s wealth”: the mismanagement of the phosphate royalties in tandem with “the devaluation of the Australian dollar against the US dollar” has resulted in total penury (Davies and Doherty, 2018). Further, facing financial crisis, “[Nauru] transformed into a money-laundering haven selling banking licences and passports, including diplomatic passports, which confer immunity” and was eventually designated a money-laundering state (Davies and Doherty, 2018).
I. The Refugee Economy
Nauru’s financial salvation came in the form of the Australian refugee detention industry. Davies and Doherty classify Nauru’s main industry as “misery and suffering, courtesy of Australia’s offshore detention policies” (Davies and Doherty, 2018). The Nauruan government is paid resettlement fees for taking in refugees who travel to and are denied entry to Australia, which reflects not only a humanitarian crisis but also further emphasizes Nauru’s dependence on Australia. A process beginning in 2001, Nauru’s leasing land to Australia to shelter asylum seekers is both controversial and unsustainable (Wardhani, 2023, p22). Davies and Doherty cite Australia as having provided “at least two-thirds of Nauru’s revenue,” but taking in more people – which is required to secure more funds – has a twofold negative impact on the tiny Pacific island.
Nauru’s refugee processing centers impact Nauruans by both contributing to racialization and racialized separations and by stressing the ecology of the nation, which is rapidly running out of land due to climate change-induced sea level rise. Australia’s settlement program resulted in its export of people to Nauru, but many Nauruans also have a negative view of asylumseekers. Bhagat expresses that, globally, “refugees face widespread racism and xenophobia while also being transformed into potentially valuable commodities for states,” which Nauru’s refugee detention industry exemplifies (Bhagat, 2024). Professor Julia Morris’s discussion of refugee extractivism highlights how “discourses levelled of savagery and underdevelopment, which [obscure] the shared conditions of exploitation experienced by refugees and locals” impact domestic relationships in Nauru but also international views on the crisis (Morris, 2020, p65). Nauruans have been construed as “primitive and dangerous through civilizational discourses of savagery and underdevelopment” by activists and media sources, which furthers domestic tensions and intensifies racialization in a nation devastated by European colonialism (Morris, 2020, p85). In a review of Morris’s work, Bhagat explains the dichotomy fostered in Nauru: “Refugees are potential threats to state security through imagined connections with global terrorist organizations and Nauruans show a continuity of the ‘savage’ Indigenous islanders who are now in charge of refugee governance on their own land” (Bhagat, 2024). The racialization that defines and separates Nauruans from refugees contradicts the Nauruan government’s claim that all is well and highlights how refugee extractivism plagues the nation.
II. Climate Crisis
Further, all inhabitants of Nauru are at risk of becoming climate refugees: Nauru is running out of land. Native Nauruans take offense to the term “climate refugee” because they do not wish to be lumped in with asylum seekers exported from Australia, but all people on the island nonetheless suffer from ecological threats (Ashiabor, 2025). Rising sea levels are devastating Nauru, with “scientists measuring sea levels rising 1.5 times faster than global averages” (Courty, 2025). Rising sea levels mean shrinking coastlines, but due to the devastation of phosphate extraction, the majority of economic activity in Nauru is concentrated in coastalregions. People are unable to move away from economic hubs because land at higher elevations has been destroyed by mining processes. Suffering from ruined land due to phosphate extraction and sea level rise, Nauruans are faced with a choice to either remain in their imperiled homeland or to forcibly relocate, abandoning the land that tangibly represents their culture and heritage. A case study in how the Global South suffers from negative externalities, the socio-economic and political conditions of Nauru demonstrate how extractive processes and post-colonial racialization continue to impact the nation.
An Analysis of Environmental Justice Concerns
The interconnected frameworks of neocolonialism, racialization, and extractivism expose environmental justice concerns in Nauru. Nauru’s history of non-consensual phosphate extraction and its more recent role as an offshore detention site for Australia reveal deep environmental justice violations. Such violations result in environmental, social, and racialized burdens of decisions from which Nauruans themselves are systematically excluded. Sociologist and professor David Naguib Pellow provides a framework for understanding environmental justice in Resisting Global Toxics. Pellow explores the distributive impacts of environmental pollution on different social classes and racial and ethnic groups in explaining environmental justice as a field of study. He highlights how marginalized peoples bear disproportionate impacts of environmental crises, a fact that is certainly evident in considering the ecological and economic devastation of Nauru in comparison to the Global North countries which have influenced and continue to affect its prosperity. In Nauru, ecological destruction can be directly tied to colonial powers’ desire for expansion through the exploitation of natural resources: definitional neocolonialism (Wardhani, 2023, p15). Pellow’s analysis demonstrates thatmarginalized populations routinely absorb the greatest ecological and economic costs of environmental degradation, which is clearly reflected in the relationship between Nauru and Germany (as a former colonial power) and between Nauru and Australia. Ludewig explains how Nauru’s co-dependencies, stemming from legacies of settler colonialism, have resulted in its reliance on Australia, which is infrastructural, political and economic; Nauru plays a “decisive role in stabilizing the extra-territorial limits of Australia as both a biological and a political community” (Ludewig 2024). Nauru has endured severe ecological devastation and economic destabilization, while Australia and other affluent states continue to benefit from the very processes that have undermined Nauru’s long-term prosperity.
Further, the procedural environmental rights of Nauruans are violated by their government’s commitment to the offshoring processing of Australian refugees. Procedural rights refer to the guarantees that individuals and communities have meaningful opportunities to participate in decision-making processes, including access to information, public participation, and legal remedies. People must have ways to express their opinions and advocate for themselves in order to challenge governmental decisions, so that they are not relegated to being passive subjects of state authority. Historically, Nauru was ecologically exploited and entirely resource depleted. More recently, the procedural environmental rights of local and native Nauruans are violated because local stakeholders are overlooked by the government as it engages in the importation of human beings for economic gain. Bhagat and LeBaron explain that Western governments’ offshoring of refugees has essentially burdened developing countries with the problem of refugee processing and governance, which can prop up authoritarian regimes and systematically incentivize governments to act sibi soli without stakeholder consultation or considering the large scale impacts and human rights violations that may occur (Bhagat andLeBaron, 2024). Limited procedural rights exacerbate environmental justice concerns because they prevent affected communities – those in which refugee processing centers exist or in which asylum seekers are resettled – from participating in decisions that directly shape their ecological, economic, and social well-being. The Nauruan government’s decision to host Australia’s offshore refugee processing operations, a decision it had to make due to its economic plight, illustrates how the denial of procedural rights – such as access to information, meaningful consultation, and avenues for contestation – can reproduce and intensify long-standing patterns of environmental harm. As illustrated by both historical resource extraction and in the more modern agreements with the Australian government, when Nauruans are excluded from deliberations about policies that transform their land use, resource allocation, or socio-political landscape, they are effectively denied the capacity to safeguard their own environmental and community interests.
Another critical element of environmental justice that is imperiled in Nauru are Indigenous rights. This injustice stems from the colonial dismissal of Indigenous relationships to land: the racialization of Nauruans and foreign asylum seekers alike demonstrates how colonial legacies continue to shape environmental injustices. Indigenous Nauruans were entirely passed over in the decision making process when Germany granted the Pacific Phosphate Company license to mine and were subsequently excluded from the profits (Wardhani, 2023, p13). Wardhani cites neocolonialism as a method by which Indigenous peoples in Nauru were steamrolled, noting that the concept “refers to the various ways colonial practices have impacted the natural environments of indigenous peoples,” thereby demonstrating how Nauru’s landscape of environmental injustice is tied to its colonial history (Wardhani, 2023, p16). Additionally, Wardhani explains how colonial powers created “a global infrastructure that encouragedwealthier countries to extract natural resources from poorer peripheral countries while simultaneously destabilizing what were often sustainable native cultures” (Wardhani, 2023, p16). Extractive logics are manifested not only in the devastation of Nauru’s land but also extend into its asylum-processing policies: Nauru becomes a site where not only natural resources but also human bodies are commodified under global and neo-colonial pressures. Australia, a Global North colonial power, has “introduced the indigenous people to capitalism through the foreign market while also restricting the natives from the ability to defend themselves against foreign intervention” by making Nauru a primary site for its offshore detention centers (Wardhani, 2023, p16). Nauru’s economic reliance on Australia has entrapped it into a capitalist cycle of structural dependency, in which the island’s limited sovereignty is leveraged by external powers to facilitate Global North political and economic agendas at the expense of local environmental integrity, Indigenous land relations, and community self-determination.
The colonial and post-colonial powers and structures that stripped away Indigenous land rights and ecological integrity continue to facilitate socio-environmental injustice. Nauru has been repurposed from an extractive site to a dumping ground where asylum seekers are sent to be detained at the expense of Indigenous Nauruans for foreign benefit. This reflects a broader pattern where marginalized and formerly colonized spaces bear environmental and social burdens for others’ economic or political ends and illuminates the environmental injustices with which Nauru is rife.
Understanding Nauru’s Dependency
Nauru’s dependency on Australia following the cessation of the mass extraction carried out by the Pacific Phosphate Company has resulted in its economic fragility and inequity.Although Nauru is formally decolonized, its position within global hierarchies reveals what scholars describe as the persistence of colonial patterns of extractivism. Emily Schmidt’s Through Colonial Patterns of Extractivism presents the Arctic as a case study for understanding the decolonization of a sector. Schmidt explains how the evolution of the energy sector in the Arctic has resulted in a sort of “green colonialism” that sees governments prioritizing the energy sector – rooted in capitalist expansive desires – over their own people, especially Indigenous people (Schmidt, 2024). Schmidt also notes how media has the power to influence and shape the narratives coming out of the Arctic. Schmidt demonstrates that as Indigenous peoples have tried to resist the domineering practices of colonial extractive powers, “the rhetoric surrounding these protests often criticized Indigenous perspectives, with the media labeling anti-pipeline activism as an act of ‘domestic terrorism’” (Schmidt, 2024). In the Arctic, “the framing of Indigenous resistance to energy developments as a threat to the country fosters colonial discourse” (Schmidt, 2024). This is also relevant in Nauru, as Nauruans are characterized as savages in contrast to struggling refugees. Further, the absence of supportive frameworks for Indigenous-led initiatives poses a challenge to decolonization. With a government continuing to import human beings – as is the case in Nauru – the exclusion of local communities from decision making processes impacting their land and resources becomes all the more stark. The transition from resource extraction to the commodification of human mobility demonstrates how extractive logics can migrate across domains. Bhagat cites Morris in explaining that “the figure of the refugee has become entangled in extractive capitalism” (Bhagat, 2024). With its phosphate depleted, Nauru became a site for the human extraction economy of offshore refugee processing. This shift mirrors the Global North’s broader practice of exporting unwanted burdens – conceptually akin to waste offloading (Pellow, 2007, Ch3) – onto Global South states embedded in unequalnetworks of political and economic dependency. In Nauru, networks of toxicity which infect the country see the intertwined natures of ecological devastation from mining and the social harms produced via Australian offshore refugee detention centers. Nauru experiences an extraction of its sovereignty, linking its decision-making processes to Australia through economic necessity. Nauru’s relationship with Australia has positioned its economy as a refugee economy rife with “immense economic disparities” that see “well-connected landowners and political leaders” benefitting at the expense of the masses (Morris, 2023). However, with human rights concerns brewing and impending climate doom, it is evident that the “asylum arrangement is not a sustainable development model,” yet it has inseparably linked Nauruan interests to Australian outsourcing (Morris, 2023). Nauru’s inescapable tie to Australian policies cements the cycle of dependency that reproduces colonial power relations while obscuring the environmental and human costs borne by Indigenous Nauruans and asylum seekers alike. Nauru’s political-economic condition is marked by a form of post-extraction dependency, in which the ecological ruin stemming from a century of colonial phosphate mining has given way to a new but equally constraining reliance on Australian capital.
Conclusion
Through ecological devastation, economic reliance on Australia, and the racialized management of both land and people, Nauru exemplifies how neoliberal governance transforms resource and human extraction into intertwined forms of dispossession and environmental vulnerability. Nauru’s trajectory, from a colonial phosphate outpost to a contemporary yet waning site of outsourced border enforcement, demonstrates how environmental injustice in the Global South continues to be reproduced through the entanglement of neoliberal governance,racialized hierarchies, and extractivist frameworks. Extractivism is not merely a historical event; it is, as Mitchell explains, an example of how “logics of permanent invasion and extraction rely on systematic and constant efforts to break down bioplurality,” shaping state development (Mitchell, 2024, p123). Nauru’s political, social, and economic fate are inextricably tied to extractive colonial practices. Those same practices reveal the durability of colonial patterns through capitalist logics, evidenced by the dismissal of Indigenous relationships to land, the export of unwanted ecological and social burdens from the Global North to the Global South, and the commodification of human bodies. The ecological precarity, economic fragility, looming climate threats, and enduring environmental injustices in Nauru are not isolated outcomes but are the predictable consequences of global power structures that result in wealthy nations externalizing costs onto marginalized and dependent communities. Nauru functions as a microcosm of global inequity and is yet another tragedy of colonialism, neoliberalism, extractivism, and racialization in the Global South. Recognizing these frameworks highlights the need for mechanisms of environmental justice that center Indigenous sovereignty, dismantle exploitative Global North-Global South relations, and confront the cumulative vulnerabilities imposed on places like Nauru by centuries of imperial and neoliberal violence and exploitation.
Author:
Thea Rosenzweig
Middlebury College
trosenzweig@middlebury.edu
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