Historian and academic James Belich has a large body of work, focusing particularly on the New Zealand Wars and Maori and Pakeha relations. His book The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1980), won the international Trevor Reed Memorial Prize for historical scholarship. In 2006 he was made an Officer of New Zealand Order of Merit. Professor Belich is currently Beit Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History Balliol College, Oxford. He will be giving a lecture at the University of Auckland on March 21 called "The Black Death and European Expansion", which argues the plague pandemic beginning on the 1340s fuelled wider European control and influence across the globe. He first made the argument in a recent book, The Prospect of Global History (Oxford University Press, 2016).