Elsey is a professor of history at Hofstra University. She is a co-director of the university's Latin American and Caribbean Studies program, is a chairperson of the Advisory Board for Hofstra's Center for Civic Engagement, and directed the university's women's studies department from 2009 until 2013.[3]
She was a recipient of the 2012 Stessin Prize for her first book, Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth Century Chile.[5]University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Jeffery Richey, writing for
theHispanic American Historical Review, lauded Citizens and Sportsmen as the "first English-language academic monograph dealing with the history of soccer in Latin America."[6] Conversely, while praising the book,
George Mason University's Matthew B. Karush in Social History criticized Elsey for not fully exploring Chilean soccer clubs' political radicalization.[7]
In 2019, Elsey joined the
Fare network as development lead for American soccer governing bodies.[8] In 2022, prior the
FIFA World Cup in Qatar, she was a speaker for
Northwestern University in Qatar's panel on the topic. She discussed Qatar's history of "gender-washing" to secure their bid for the World Cup, predicted that Qatar would not feature women's soccer teams, and outlined a history of discriminatory practices that she believed could re-emerge. Elsey was a monitor for discrimination during the 2022 World Cup.[9][10]
She co-hosts the podcast Burn It All Down alongside
Shireen Ahmed, Amira Rose Davis, Lindsay Gibbs, and Jessica Luther. According to
OZY's Michelle Bruton, it was the first feminist sports podcast to analyze sports culture from an
intersectional feminist lens.[17]
Works
Books
Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile.
University of Texas; 2011.
Bad Ambassadors: A History of the Pan-American Games of the 1950s, International Journal of Sport History.
As the World is My Witness: Popular Culture and the Chilean Solidarity Movement, 1974−1987,
University of Wisconsin Press in Topographies of Transnationalism; 2013.
Breaking the Machine: The Politics of South American Football,
University of California Press in Global Latin America; 2016.
Football and the boundaries of History.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 466 pages
Futbolera: Historia de la mujer y el deporte en América Latina. Co-produced with Joshua Nadel; 2019.
Articles
Sport, Gender, and Politics in Latin America,
Oxford University’s Sport in History; 2014
Football at the “end” of the World: the 1962 World Cup in Chile, in Kay Schiller and
Stefan Rinke’s Histories of the World Cup;
Göttingen, Wallstein, 2014.