She is also the faculty leader for the First Year Experience Course, City-University Life. Burns did her undergraduate work at Tulane University and spent a year in Paris at the Université de Paris IV. She completed her master's degree and Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in Modern European History with a focus on 20th century France. She has taught courses on gender, the Holocaust and the Modern Middle East as well as European history surveys. Her research interests center around the role of the "other" in mainstream society and the debates about political and social consciousness.