Rate My Professor Kirstin Mills

Kirstin Mills is Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Research and Graduate Diploma of Research in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University. She earned her PhD in Literature from Macquarie University in 2014, with a thesis entitled "Imagined Worlds: the Role of Dreams, Space, and the Supernatural in the Evolution of Victorian Fantasy," and a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in Literature from the same university prior to 2006. Mills commenced her academic career at Macquarie University in 2009 as a sessional lecturer and tutor in the Department of English, continuing in various teaching roles until 2019. In 2019, she served as Lecturer-in-Charge for the School of Arts at the Australian Catholic University, North Sydney. She led the design and implementation of the innovative Graduate Diploma of Research and nested Graduate Certificate of Research in the Faculty of Arts, launched in 2025. Throughout her tenure, she has taught undergraduate and postgraduate units on medieval, Gothic, Victorian literature, contemporary literature, narrative theory, creative writing, research theory, methods, writing, and professional development.

Mills specialises in Gothic and fantastic literature and visual media from the long nineteenth century to contemporary adaptations. Her research examines literary representations of space, the supernatural, sciences of the mind—including nineteenth-century theories of dreams, madness, and alternative consciousness—and Victorian concepts of the fourth dimension, alongside twenty-first-century digital media adaptations of Gothic literature, Gothic animal studies, and the Gothic and gender. Forthcoming publications include the edited book Victorian Gothic and the Occult (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), with chapters "Gothic and the occult in the Long Nineteenth Century" and "Mediumship, lost texts, and the occult afterlives of the Victorian Gothic." Other recent works are "Frankenstein and the sciences of the undead" in The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (2025), and the co-authored article "Mutation in media and popular culture" in M/C Journal (2025). As Editor of Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, since 2023) and Series Editor for the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Book Series with Clemson University Press (since 2023), she contributes significantly to the field. Mills serves on the University's Graduate Research Management Committee as Deputy Chair of the Faculty of Arts Research Training Committee, and is a board member of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association and Australasian Horror Studies Network. She delivers invited lectures, such as on Gothic literature history and Coleridge's nightmares, and contributes expert commentary to Macquarie University's The Lighthouse magazine and various media outlets.