Karen Burns

In 2013 Burns played a key role in establishing Parlour: women, equity, architecture, with Justine Clark, Naomi Stead and others. Developed as a "space to speak" for women in architecture, this provides research, resources and informed opinion about gender equity and architecture. Writing by Burns on Parlour includes:

Burns' has given invited keynote presentations at three conferences: Fabulations, the Annual Conference of SAHANZ, University of Tasmania, July 2012; Interstices, University of Tasmania, November 2011; Whirlwinds Symposium, Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, December 2010. She has presented her research work at many more conferences and symposia and is an active member of the academic community.

Parlour also ran the 2012 symposium, Transform: Altering the Future of Architecture, which was co-convened by Burns with colleagues Justine Clark and Naomi Stead and hosted by the University of Melbourne.

Burns was an active researcher on the Australian Research Council funded project Equity and Diversity in the Australian Architectural Profession: women, work and leadership (2011-2014), which was led by Naomi Stead of the University of Queensland. One of its key outcomes was Parlour: women, equity, architecture. Burns was instrumental in establishing this organisation with colleagues from the research project, and was responsible for coining the name Parlour. This can be understood in the context of her long engagement in feminist and social activism in architecture.

Burns edited four issues of this publication, which is the journal of the Art Association of Australia & New Zealand between 2004 and 2006.

In 1991 Burns curated the exhibition Insight Out with Anna Horne. This took the form of architectural installations at 200 Gertrude Street and five other outdoor sites in Fitzroy, Melbourne. The exhibition examined urban change, gentrification, housing stress and historical memory.

Burns has held academic positions at a number of universities in Melbourne. She began her academic career at RMIT University (1986–1995) and then joined the Department of English and Cultural Studies and Department of Fine Arts, Classics and Archaeology, University of Melbourne (1997–1999, 2001). She spent three years at the Centre for Ideas, Victorian College of the Arts (2002–2004), of which she was Acting Director in 2002–2003. She joined the new Department of Architecture at Monash University in 2008 and was later appointed as a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, a position she still holds.

She was editor of Transition: Discourse on Architecture, an influential quarterly journal published by RMIT University, from July 1986 – December 1991. This saw her edit 17 issues of the publication. From 1987, this was an editorial partnership with Harriet Edquist. Highlights of the journal over this period include:

Burns studied English literature and art history at Monash University, the latter with Patrick McCaughey and Conrad Hamann. She was Hamann's first honours student. Burns graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (hons) in 1984 and a Master of Arts in 1987. She began studying architecture at RMIT University in 1986, and began editing the magazine Transition the same year. Her PhD, "Urban Tourism, 1851-53: sightseeing, representation and The Stones of Venice" was completed in 1999 at the School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archaeology, University of Melbourne.

Karen Burns (born 1962) is an architectural historian and theorist based in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently a senior lecturer in architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne.

Born in January 1962, Burns grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Beaumaris. Her feminist activism first found expression in 1978 when she worked as a volunteer at a newly established refuge for women and children escaping family violence.

Her academic research focuses on three principal areas: Australian frontier housing and problems of interpretation, late-twentieth-century feminist architectural history and theory, and alliances between architects, aesthetics and manufacturers in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. In relation to the last topic she is working on a book titled Object Lessons: Demonstrating Victorian Design Reform, 1835–1870.