Kim Phillips is Associate Professor in History at the University of Auckland, where she previously held the positions of Lecturer (1997-2001) and Senior Lecturer (2001-2013). Kim is originally from Melbourne, Australia, where she completed her BA and BA (Hons) at the University of Melbourne (1991) before receiving a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, UK, where she completed her DPhil (1998).

Kim maintains two main areas of research interest, which she explores both separately and in conjunction with one another. The first is the history of medieval women, gender and sexuality in European societies c. 1100 c. 1550. Histories of life cycle and the body form part of this research strand. The second is representations of foreign lands and peoples in medieval travel and ethnographic writing. Her recent publications include Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245-1510 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages (as editor) (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), and articles on travel writing in medieval Britain and Europe, and gender and sexuality in the medieval Christian tradition. She is working on articles and chapters on European representations of Chinese cities, foreigners' portrayal of medieval Irish women, the cultural history of hair, and women's bodies in vernacular medical texts.