[1] Keys taught history at California State University in Sacramento from 2003 through 2005 while she worked on her first book, Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s.
[3] Keys has been a research fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.[4] and at the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz (2017).
[1] In 2019, Keys was the fifth woman and the first scholar based outside the United States to serve as President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations since the organization's founding in 1969.
The book is transnational in scope and nature, focusing on the United States, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union in the decades before the Second World War and details how countries of various, and sometimes seemingly oppositional, ideologies were impelled to participate in an emerging global sporting culture.
Keys's book argues that the commitment to the protection and promotion of international human rights in the United States was not a logical extension of American idealism but rather a reaction to national trauma.
By spotlighting and rallying against human rights abuses, such as torture in South Korea and Chile, liberals in the United States attempted to distance themselves from foreign villains.