Kirstin Mills is the Faculty MRes Director and Lecturer, HDR Programs in Macquarie University's Faculty of Arts. In this role she convenes the Faculty's Master of Research and Bachelor of Philosophy program, and also designs and teaches core research and communication skills within it. Some of these units include:

- FOAR7001 Research Communications
- FOAR7002 Research Frontiers 1
- FOAR7003 Digital Literacies for Researchers

From 2009-2019, prior to her role as Faculty MRes Director and Lecturer, Kirstin taught in Macquarie University's Department of English as a sessional lecturer and tutor. She taught on a wide range of units at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, and on literature from the medieval to the contemporary.

Kirstin Mills specialises in gothic literature and visual media from the eighteenth century to the present day, as well as literature and culture of the long nineteenth century. Her research examines representations of space, the supernatural and the sciences of the mind, including nineteenth-century scientific theories of dreams, madness and alternative states of consciousness. She also works on various intersections between gothic texts and the historical, cultural and technological contexts they emerge within and are adapted into. Her published writing has focused on various approaches to the Gothic, including optics and space, dreams and higher-dimensional space, demonic animals and human gender, and the adaptation of classic gothic texts into twenty-first-century digital forms. She has published on authors such as Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Horace Walpole, Gottfried August Bürger, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and Lucas Malet.