Kaete O’Connell is the Roosevelt Visiting Fellow from 24 August to 18 September 2026.
Kaete O’Connell is Deputy Director of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). A historian of the United States and the world, her research explores the intersection of conflict and culture in the 20th century. Her first book, Recipe for Democracy: U.S. Food Power, Occupied Germany, and the Origins of the Cold War (UVA Press, forthcoming 2027), traces how U.S. food policy shifted from a punitive tool to a deliberate strategy of reconstruction and anti-Soviet diplomacy. Bridging military and diplomatic studies, the book argues that this shift established food power as a central instrument of American Cold War strategy.
O’Connell has authored essays exploring food as an instrument of diplomacy, the memory and mediation of atrocity in American culture, and the politics of food security more broadly from the postwar period to the present. She previously held positions at SMU’s Center for Presidential History and Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. In 2024, she was named a WWII Emerging Scholar by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
At the RIAS, O’Connell will conduct research for her new book project examining 1948 and the close of the postwar era. The book weaves diplomatic, political, and cultural history together to show that the Marshall Plan, the Displaced Persons Act, the desegregation of the military, and the fault lines exposed by the 1948 election were not separate developments but different facets of the same unresolved postwar reckoning.
