Kim M. Phillips is an Australian–New Zealand academic historian, and is a full professor of history at the University of Auckland, specialising in gender, sexuality and women in the medieval period.
[4] Phillips focuses on researching women, gender and sexuality in the medieval period.
She has a particular interest in mermaids and their evolution alongside ideas about the female body in medieval literature.
[3] In 2013 Phillips was invited to give the Keith Sinclair lecture at the University of Auckland, where she spoke on Strange encounters: Europeans in Asia before the modern era.
In 2015 she was nominated for the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History from the American Historical Association, for her book Before Orientalism.