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 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 [REF].