Kaete O’Connell is a historian of the United States and the world, with research interests in food diplomacy, postwar reconstruction, and military occupations. Her first book, Tasting Freedom: U.S. Food Power, Occupied Germany, and the Origins of the Cold War, will be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2025. In addition to several edited volumes, her scholarly and popular essays have appeared in Diplomatic History, Food and Foodways, Time, and The Washington Post. In 2024, she was named a WWII Emerging Scholar by the National Archives and Records Administration.

O’Connell is currently editing a special forum on food and foreign relations for Diplomatic History and co-editing a volume on the U.S. military and the Holocaust with Adam Seipp. She is also at work on two book projects: the first explores presidential gastrodiplomacy using a series of case studies and the second is a study of the Anglo-American occupation of Iceland during WWII.

Prior to Yale, she was a postdoctoral fellow at SMU’s Center for Presidential History, a doctoral research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany, and a visiting instructor in the American studies department at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She received a PhD in history from Temple University.