Barbara Keys is Professor of U.S. and International History in the Department of History at Durham University. She began her teaching career in 2003 after receiving her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, where she studied under Akira Iriye and Ernest May. In 2019 she served as the President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Research Interests
• Henry Kissinger’s legacy
• the history of campaigns to abolish torture from the 1945 to the present and the role of information and communications technology in human rights movements
• the role of emotions in international relations, including personal diplomacy
• the history of human rights activism at the Olympic Games
Biography
Before coming to Durham, Barbara Keys taught at the University of Melbourne and California State University in Sacramento and was a research fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. She has been a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley, the Center for European Studies at Harvard, the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin, and the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz. Her teaching areas include the history of human rights, 20th century international relations, U.S. foreign relations, recent U.S. history, and the Cold War in global perspective.
Grants and Awards
She was awarded the 2010 Stuart Bernath Lecture Prize, awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the University of Melbourne’s 2015 Woodward Medal in Humanities and Social Sciences for her book Reclaiming American Virtue. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Australian Society for Sports History.
In addition to numerous smaller grants, she received two major Australian Research Council Discovery Project Awards: “Making Torture Unthinkable: The International Campaign against Torture, 1967-1984” (2011-2014) and “Moral Claims in International Sports Events and the Ethics of World Order” (2017-2020), with Roland Burke and Xu Guoqi.
Professional Activities
She served as an editor of Modern American History (2019-22) and serves on the Editorial Board of Human Rights Quarterly. She served a three-year term on the editorial board of Diplomatic History (2009-2011). A long-time member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, she served on the Membership Committee, the Nominating Committee, the Stuart Bernath Article Prize Committee, the Committee on the Status of Women, and the Stuart Bernath Lecture Prize Committee before being elected Vice President (2018) and President (2019).
In addition to giving keynote lectures in Australia, Canada, Greece, the United Kingdom, and the United States, she has given talks at the University of Chicago, the University of Connecticut, Harvard University, Ohio State University, the German Historical Institute (Washington), the Newberry Library, Temple University, Vassar College, the University of California at San Diego, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Freiburg, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Study, the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (Mainz), the Center for the History of Emotions (Berlin), the U.S. Studies Centre (Sydney), Monash University, La Trobe University, University of Sydney, the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), the University of Zürich, the Danish Institute for Human Rights, the International Sports Relations Foundation Forum (Seoul), the International Olympic Academy (Olympia), and the Australian Institute for International Affairs.