Professor Burns is a Lecturer at Boston College and is serving as the Acting Associate Director of the Environmental Studies program. In the course of her career, she has taught a wide variety of students, from contemporary art curators pursuing master’s degrees to low-income adults taking “bridge-to-college” classes. Before arriving at BC, she taught modern art history and architecture at the University of Illinois at the undergraduate and graduate level for 13 years. Her current interest in sustainable building, place-making, and urban form grows directly out of her long engagement with the tenets of modernist architecture and planning. Getting students to think critically about these older ways of designing, building, and living on earth and inspiring them to search out and explore sustainable alternatives is the core of her current work.