Some historians spend careers studying kings, wars, and the grand machinery of politics. Kim Phillips has spent hers looking somewhere else entirely: at the bodies, desires, and daily realities of women who lived seven centuries ago, and at the mermaids, maidens, and travelers who populated the medieval imagination alongside them. As a full professor of history at the University of Auckland, Phillips has built an international reputation as one of the leading scholars of gender, sexuality, and womanhood in the medieval period, a scholar whose work asks not just what happened in the Middle Ages, but what it felt like to be a body moving through that world, especially a female one.
Kim Phillips’s Early Life and Education in Australia
Kim Phillips’s academic story begins in Melbourne, Australia, where she grew up before pursuing her undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne. Melbourne in the latter decades of the twentieth century was a city with a strong tradition of humanities scholarship, and it was there that Phillips first developed the interests in history, literature, and gender that would come to define her career.
Undergraduate study, however, was only the beginning. Like many ambitious young scholars from Australia and New Zealand, Phillips looked abroad for postgraduate opportunities that would deepen and sharpen her historical training, and she found them in England.
Kim Phillips’s Postgraduate Study at the University of York
Kim Phillips won a Commonwealth Scholarship, a prestigious award that funds students from across the Commonwealth to pursue postgraduate study in the United Kingdom, and used it to travel to the University of York. York has long been recognized as one of the world’s leading centers for medieval studies, home to the Centre for Medieval Studies and a dense concentration of scholars working on everything from manuscript culture to urban history.
It was at York that Phillips completed the doctoral research that would shape the rest of her scholarly life. Her PhD thesis, titled The Medieval Maiden: Young Womanhood in Late Medieval England, was completed in 1997 under the supervision of two respected medievalists, Jeremy Goldberg and Felicity Riddy. The thesis explored a subject that had, until relatively recently, received little sustained scholarly attention: the specific social and cultural category of the maiden, the unmarried young woman, in late medieval English society. What did it mean to be neither a child nor a wife? How was that liminal identity constructed, policed, and experienced?
This early research question would echo throughout Phillips’s later work. Time and again, her scholarship returns to the idea that categories we might assume are timeless or natural, maidenhood, beauty, femininity, sexuality, are in fact historically constructed, contested, and constantly changing.
Kim Phillips Joins the University of Auckland
In 1997, the same year she completed her doctorate, Kim Phillips joined the faculty of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. It was the start of a long academic home. Over more than two decades at Auckland, she built a research and teaching career that would eventually see her rise to full professor in 2021, and by 2024, she had taken on the role of Head of the School of Humanities, a significant leadership position within the university’s Faculty of Arts and Education.
Her rise through the ranks at Auckland reflects not just longevity but sustained scholarly output and recognition. Along the way, she received an Early Career Research Excellence Award from the university, as well as a Faculty of Arts Teaching Excellence Award, signaling that her impact was felt in the classroom as much as in her published research.
Kim Phillips’s Scholarly Focus on Gender, Sexuality, and the Body
At the center of Kim Phillips’s work is a preoccupation with gender, sexuality, and the female body in the medieval period, roughly the centuries between 1100 and 1500. This is a broad canvas, and Phillips has painted across much of it: from courtly ideals of feminine beauty to the sumptuary laws that governed what people could wear, from travel writing about distant peoples to the intimate rituals of noble households.
Her first major book, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540, published by Manchester University Press in 2003, grew directly out of her doctoral research. It examined how young unmarried women were represented and regulated in late medieval England, drawing on legal records, conduct literature, and cultural texts to reconstruct a social category that earlier historians had often overlooked.
She followed this with a series of edited collections that helped shape the wider field. Sexualities in History: A Reader (2002), co-edited with Barry Reay, brought together key texts on the history of sexuality for students and scholars. Young Medieval Women (1999), co-edited with Katherine J. Lewis and Noel James Menuge, focused specifically on the lives of young women across medieval Europe. Later, Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History (2011), again with Reay, examined how ideas about sex and desire operated before the modern concept of sexuality as an identity category had fully emerged.
Before Orientalism: Kim Phillips’s Global Turn
Perhaps Kim Phillips’s most acclaimed single-authored work is Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2014. The book marked something of an expansion in her scholarly range, moving from questions of gender and the body toward the history of cross-cultural encounter, travel writing, and European perceptions of Asia in the centuries before Edward Said’s famous concept of Orientalism is usually thought to apply.
The book examines how medieval European travelers, missionaries, and merchants described the peoples they encountered in Asia, arguing that these early accounts operated under different assumptions and anxieties than the later colonial-era Orientalism that Said analyzed. The work was well received in the field and was nominated for the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History, awarded by the American Historical Association, a mark of its significance to the broader discipline of world and global history, not just medieval European studies.
Phillips has continued to write on related themes, including an essay on travel writing and the global Middle Ages published in History Compass in 2016, reflecting her ongoing interest in how medieval Europeans made sense of a wider world.
Kim Phillips’s Mermaid Project: Bodies, Beauty, and the Male Gaze
In more recent years, one of Kim Phillips’s most publicly engaging research threads has centered on an unexpected figure: the mermaid. In her 2021 inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Auckland, titled Of Mermaids and Men: A Chapter in the History of Women’s Bodies, Phillips traced the evolution of the mermaid from the ancient Siren, originally imagined as a half-bird, half-woman creature, into the fish-tailed figure familiar from fairy tales and film today.
She argues that this transformation was not simply an aesthetic accident. As she explained in university materials promoting the lecture, she became interested in what social and cultural forces prompted the mermaid’s emergence and how those forces remain relevant for women today. Drawing on sources ranging from the second-century bestiary text Physiologus to illuminated medieval manuscripts, she showed how early Christian writers cast the Siren as deceitful and dangerous, linking her to the temptations of Satan and the corruption of the soul.
Phillips located a turning point in the Romanesque period, roughly 900 to 1200 CE, when the Siren’s transformation into a sea-girl with one or two tails became complete, visible, for instance, in an early carving at Durham Castle from around 1078. From the twelfth century onward, she has argued, poetic conventions describing idealized feminine beauty, head to toe, feature by feature, began to shape how mermaids, and women generally, were imagined and judged, largely according to male preferences of the era.
What makes this strand of Kim Phillips’s work distinctive is her insistence that the mermaid was not merely a passive object of male fantasy. As she put it in her lecture, medieval mermaids were both powerful and free, a combination that fascinated and enraged medieval men in equal measure. Unlike mortal women of the period, who were subject to intense social control, mermaids in the medieval imagination retained an elusive independence, teasing, tempting, and ultimately escaping back into the sea, beyond the reach of male authority.
Kim Phillips’s Recognition and Professional Service
Beyond her published research, Kim Phillips has played an active role in the broader medieval studies community. She served as president of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies from 2005 to 2009, helping to steer one of the key regional organizations supporting medievalist scholarship in the Southern Hemisphere. She was invited to deliver the Keith Sinclair Lecture at the University of Auckland in 2013, speaking on European encounters with Asia before the modern era, and in 2020 she served as a plenary speaker at a joint meeting of the Medieval Association of the Pacific and the Medieval Academy of America, one of the most prominent gatherings in the field internationally.
These roles reflect a scholar whose influence extends well beyond her own publications, shaping the direction and community of medieval studies across multiple countries and institutions.
Kim Phillips: A Career Defined by Recovering Hidden Histories
What unites Kim Phillips’s diverse body of work, from unmarried medieval girls to Asian travel writing to the erotic history of the mermaid, is a consistent commitment to recovering histories that mainstream scholarship once overlooked. Her research insists that categories like gender, sexuality, and the body are not fixed facts of human nature but are constructed differently in different times and places, shaped by religion, law, art, and the anxieties of those in power.
It is fitting, then, that a scholar so attuned to how the past shapes ideas we take for granted has spent recent years asking audiences to look again at something as familiar as a mermaid, and to see in her not just a fairy tale, but a centuries-old argument about what women’s bodies are allowed to mean.
Conclusion
From Melbourne to York to Auckland, Kim Phillips’s career traces a path familiar to many scholars who work across national boundaries in pursuit of a specialized field, but the questions she asks remain distinctly her own. By examining maidens, mermaids, and medieval travelers with equal rigor, she has helped build a richer, more textured understanding of how gender and sexuality functioned in the medieval world, and, in doing so, has offered readers and audiences a way to think more critically about the categories that still shape how women’s bodies are seen today. As Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Auckland, she continues to mentor new generations of historians while extending a body of research that has already reshaped how scholars think about womanhood in the Middle Ages.
FAQs
What is Kim Phillips known for?
Kim Phillips is a medieval historian best known for her research on gender, sexuality, women’s history, and the body in medieval Europe. Her work examines how ideas about femininity, beauty, maidenhood, and female identity were shaped by medieval society, religion, literature, and law.
Where does Kim Phillips teach?
Kim Phillips is a professor of history at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She became a full professor in 2021 and has served as the Head of the School of Humanities, where she teaches and conducts research in medieval history and gender studies.
What is Before Orientalism about?
Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510 examines how medieval European travelers described Asian societies before the colonial era. Kim Phillips argues that these early accounts reflected medieval religious, cultural, and political perspectives rather than the later forms of Orientalism associated with European imperialism.
Why does Kim Phillips study mermaids in medieval history?
Kim Phillips uses the medieval image of the mermaid to examine changing ideas about women’s bodies, beauty, power, and sexuality. Her research shows how the figure evolved from the ancient Siren into the familiar fish-tailed mermaid and how medieval writers used that image to express cultural attitudes toward women and female independence.
How has Kim Phillips influenced medieval studies?
Kim Phillips has expanded the study of medieval history by highlighting groups and themes that were often overlooked, including young unmarried women, gender roles, sexuality, and cross-cultural encounters. Through her books, teaching, and leadership within the medieval studies community, she has helped shape modern scholarship on the social and cultural history of the Middle Ages.
