JAMES BELICH
Professor James Belich is revered as an outstanding New Zealand historian. Perhaps best known publicly for his television presentation of his book The New Zealand Wars, he is also an outstanding figure on the international stage, establishing his intellectual authority among leading historians in a range of fields - imperial history, military history, the history of resistance movements and settler societies. He has been a major force in helping to relocate New Zealand historiography in a global setting, providing particularly powerful case studies of a settlement society coming to terms with its indigenous people.
Professor Belich has published an array of articles and reviews in refereed journals as well as four major books on New Zealand history, all of them award-winning. While these works have focused generally on issues surrounding the concept of national identity, they have also been founded on themes that are international - Victorian interpretation of racial conflict, recolonisation, the Angloworld. His work has thus always been transnational and this broader contextualising of events leads directly to his recent writing about British and American expansion since the late eighteenth century.
Professor Belich's peers describe his unusual capacity to create intellectual excitement, attributing this ability partly to the resource of an original mind, and partly to a gift for expression both in speech and on paper. They also attest to his abilities to interrelate antipodean perspectives with other historiographies. Applying these interrelationships both ways leads to an outstanding contribution both to New Zealand history and, increasingly, to the broad field of European expansion.