Burns, Karen
Burns, Karen
Bio Sketch
Karen Burns is an Australian architectural historian, theorist and critic, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. An art historian and cultural theorist by training (as Intimus's editors introduce her), she works on feminism and architecture, nineteenth-century design reform, postmodernism, and late twentieth-century global architectural history; her current research focuses on women as architects, theorists and users from the 1960s onwards, and on nineteenth-century domesticity, design and imperial histories. She coordinates undergraduate teaching in settler-Indigenous history of the built environment and has been active in feminist politics since the late 1970s. Her 1997 essay "A House for Josephine Baker" — published in the postcolonial-theory anthology Postcolonial Space(s) and reprinted in Intimus — is an early landmark in the feminist-postcolonial reading of architecture, analysing how criticism's conflation of Josephine Baker's body with Loos's unbuilt Baker House assigns race, gender and a denied interiority to both.
Key Works
- *A House for Josephine Baker* (1997/2006) — the feminist-postcolonial reading of the Baker House's critical reception: the unreadable interior, the body/house conflation, the epidermal schema, and the suspense-structure of criticism.
- Contributing work on the transnational "global encyclopaedia of women in architecture" research project — using the project "as a site for unsettling the terms, chronology, and geography of feminist" architectural historiography.
- Research programme on women as architects, theorists and users from the 1960s onwards; nineteenth-century domesticity, design reform and imperial histories (University of Melbourne research profile).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- Epidermal Schema — Spivak's criticism relayed and applied: skin as the visible sign of difference, and its insufficiency
- Corporeal Inscription — Foucault/Butler's surface-writing of the body, extended to race and to buildings
- Primitivism — the critical operation that reads 'Africa' (and otherness) into surfaces; the self-critique of alterity-retrieval
- Interiority — its denial as a racialized operation: "someone whose interior is completely unknowable"
- Gender and the Interior — costume, skin and interior as surfaces of difference; the race-coordinate the gender/interior cluster lacks
Relevance to the Core Research
Burns gives the wiki's interior cluster its race-critical coordinate and its most radical challenge to interiority. Where Taylor & Preston diagnose the gendered identification of women with the domestic and the decorative, Burns shows the same conflation operating racially: body, costume, skin and facade read as surfaces "supporting a point of difference and otherness," and the raced female subject construed as lacking the interior that the domestic interior is supposed to shelter. Her essay also supplies the wiki's first sustained model of criticism as an object of analysis — architectural writing examined for what its readings do ("what tasks it performs, what actions it enables") rather than what they mean — directly relevant to the researcher's work on architecture's interpretive conventions (the interpretation concept, the power-and-space debate's gaze-register).
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
