Rate My Professor Elizabeth Burns-Dans

Dr. Elizabeth Burns-Dans is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Murdoch University, specializing in the History section. She joined Murdoch University in 2023, marking her first teaching position following the completion of her MPhil and PhD at the University of Notre Dame Australia in Fremantle. Her MPhil thesis, titled 'The Dark Romanticism of Francisco de Goya,' was awarded in 2018. Burns-Dans's research engages with art history, theory, and criticism, particularly in medieval and Renaissance periods. She employs the History of Experience as a methodological approach to access and understand historical lived experiences through art, focusing on how artworks reveal the sensory and emotional worlds of their creators. Her work explores representations of unruly objects, such as cephalopods in early modern manuscript and print illustrations, tracing their classical and medieval inheritances into the early modern imagination. Prior to her current role, she contributed to projects including 'A History of the Architects Board of Western Australia, 1921-2021' with Alexandra Wallis and Deborah Gare, and 'The Art of Contested Histories: In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] and the Pacific Legacy' during her time at Notre Dame.