Kaete O’Connell is a research affiliate with the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. She is a historian of the U.S. and the world whose work uses food as a lens to examine the intersection of power, conflict, and culture. Her first book, Recipe for Democracy: U.S. Food Power, Occupied Germany, and the Origins of the Cold War (forthcoming 2026), shows how U.S. food policy helped shape the postwar international order. She is currently developing two projects: one on presidential gastrodiplomacy and another on the cultural and political turning points of 1948.

O’Connell is a Senior Fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History and serves as deputy director of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). She has taught in history, American studies, and global affairs programs in both Germany and the U.S. Her work has been supported by the Leibniz Institute of European History, the German Historical Institute, and the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. In 2024, O’Connell was named a WWII Emerging Scholar by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. She earned her PhD from Temple University.