Karen Burns (academic) facts for kids

Karen Burns, born in 1962, is an expert in the history and ideas behind architecture from Australia. She teaches architecture at the University of Melbourne.

Early Life and Learning

Karen Burns was born in January 1962. She grew up in Beaumaris, a suburb of Melbourne. When she was 16, in 1978, she started helping women and children who needed a safe place to stay. This was her first step in working for women's rights.

Burns studied English literature and art history at Monash University. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984. She then completed her Master of Arts degree in 1987. In 1986, she began studying architecture at RMIT University. At the same time, she started editing a magazine called Transition. She finished her PhD in 1999 at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD focused on how people saw cities in the 1850s.

Teaching and Research

Karen Burns has taught at several universities in Melbourne. She started her teaching career at RMIT University in 1986. Later, she joined the University of Melbourne. She also worked at the Victorian College of the Arts. In 2008, she joined the architecture department at Monash University. Today, she is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design.

Her research looks at three main areas. She studies early Australian homes and how to understand them. She also explores the history of women in architecture and their ideas from the late 1900s. Her third area is about how architects, artists, and makers worked together in Britain in the mid-1800s. She is writing a book about this topic.

Burns was part of a big research project from 2011 to 2014. This project looked at fairness and diversity in Australian architecture. It focused on women, work, and leadership in the field. A key result of this project was creating Parlour: women, equity, architecture. Karen Burns helped start this group. She also came up with the name "Parlour." This shows her long history of working for women's rights in architecture.

She has given important talks at many conferences. These include events at the University of Tasmania and the Bartlett School of Architecture. She often shares her research and is an active part of the academic world.

Working for Change

Karen Burns has always been involved in working for women's rights and fairness in architecture. In 1990, she helped start a group in Melbourne called E1027: Women in Architecture. This group had 80 members by 1991. It included many important women architects and artists.

In 1991, Burns helped create an art exhibition called Insight Out. This exhibition showed architectural art in Fitzroy, Melbourne. It explored how cities change and how people remember history.

In 2013, Burns played a big part in starting Parlour: women, equity, architecture. She worked with Justine Clark and Naomi Stead to create it. Parlour is a place for women in architecture to share their thoughts. It offers research and ideas about fairness for women in the field. Karen Burns has written several articles for Parlour, including:

• Who Wants to be a Woman Architect?
• The Elephant in our Parlour: Everyday Sexism in Architecture
• Why Do Women Leave?

Parlour also held a big meeting in 2012 called Transform: Altering the Future of Architecture. Karen Burns helped organize this event.

Important Writings

• Karen Burns and Lori Brown. "Telling Transnational Histories of Women in Architecture, 1960–2015." Architectural Histories, 2020.
• Karen Burns. "Anthologizing Post-Structuralism: Architecture, Écriture, Gender, and Subjectivity." The Figure of Knowledge Conditioning Architectural Theory 1960s - 1990s, 2020.
• Karen Burns. "Time and Telegraphy: Nineteenth-Century Contexts for Stained Glass." 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2020.
• Karen Burns, "Between the Walls: remembering colonial frontier space at Purrumbete, 1901 – 02" in Interspaces: Art + Architectural Exchanges from East to West, 2012.
• Karen Burns, "The Woman/Architect Distinction", Architectural Theory Review, 2012.
• Karen Burns, "A Girl’s Own Adventure: gender in the contemporary architectural theory anthology", Journal of Architectural Education, 2012.
• Karen Burns, "Frontier conflict, contact, exchange: re-imagining colonial architecture", Proceedings of the 27th International Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) Conference, 2012.
• Karen Burns, "Ex libris: archaeologies of feminism, architecture and deconstruction", Architectural Theory Review, 2010.
• Karen Burns, "The Grammar of Ornament: A Pacific Tale", Proceedings of the 26th International Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) Conference, 2009.
• Karen Burns, "The Afterlife of an Architectural Event", Assemblage, 2001.
• Karen Burns, "A House For Josephine Baker", in Postcolonial Space(s), 1997.
• Karen Burns, "Topographies of Tourism: 'Documentary' Photography and The Stones of Venice", Assemblage, 1997.
• Karen Burns, "Architecture/Discipline/Bondage" in Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender and the Interdisciplinary, 1996.

Exhibitions She Curated

Karen Burns has organized several art and architecture exhibitions. These include:

• 1991 Insight Out, at 200 Gertrude Street and other outdoor places in Fitzroy. She worked with Anna Horne on this.
• 1991 Diologhi per una possibile Utopia, in Italy. She worked with Harriet Edquist and Mauro Baracco.
• 1991 Companion City, at ACCA (Australian Centre of Contemporary Art). She worked with Harriet Edquist.
• 1989 Robin Boyd: The Architect as Critic, at the State Library of Victoria. She worked with Harriet Edquist, Philip Goad and Dean Cass.