Kaete O’Connell (PhD, Temple University) is a historian of the United States in the world. Her research interests include food security, humanitarian aid, military occupations, and cultural diplomacy. She is currently writing a book that reveals how U.S. policymakers learned to deploy sustenance as leverage in the early Cold War. Under contract with the University of Virginia Press, Tasting Freedom: U.S. Occupied Germany and the Origins of Cold War Food Diplomacy provides the first in-depth study of food policy in the U.S. Zone. It argues that the origins of food aid as an anti-communist strategy are located in postwar Germany. Prior to Yale, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, dissertation fellow at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, and visiting instructor in the American Studies department at the University of Tübingen.