[citation needed] 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.
[citation needed] Burns studied English literature and art history at Monash University, the latter with Patrick McCaughey and Conrad Hamann.
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.
[3][4][5] 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.
Burns has played important roles in a range of publications, both scholarly and professional, as editor, contributor and advisor.
She was editor of Transition: Discourse on Architecture, an influential[13] quarterly journal published by RMIT University, from July 1986 – December 1991.
Members also included women artists such as Kathy Temin, Sarah Curtis, Lauren Berkowitz and Jan Nelson.
In 2013 Burns played a key role in establishing Parlour: women, equity, architecture, with Justine Clark, Naomi Stead and others.