Professional Background
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, she holds a PhD (2019) from Temple University. 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, reshaping U.S.-German relations in the process.
Dr. 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. Her research has been supported by the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy, the Leibniz Institute of European History, the German Historical Institute, and the Harry S. Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential libraries. In 2024, Dr. O’Connell was named a World War II Emerging Scholar by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
Fellowship Research
As a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellow, Dr. O’Connell will conduct research for her new book project, tentatively titled 1948: The Wages of Victory, which argues that 1948 marked the abrupt 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 presidential election were not separate developments but different facets of the same unresolved postwar reckoning. Central to this argument is the claim that the Holocaust functions not as prologue but as presence: though the camps had been liberated for three years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish displaced persons remained in limbo, awaiting placement that the United States and its allies were reluctant to provide.
This gap between moral rhetoric and U.S. policy is one theme to which the book repeatedly returns. During the fellowship, Dr. O’Connell will draw on the personal papers of humanitarian workers and soldiers, alongside the testimony of Displaced Persons, to recover how the rhetoric of liberation and democratic responsibility registered not as policy abstractions but as lived experience.
Residency Period: November 1, 2026 - April 30, 2027