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A historian of the United States and the world, Dr. O'Connell's research explores the intersection of conflict and culture. She joined the Center for Presidential History in 2019 and is currently Deputy Director of the .

O'Connell's first book, Recipe for Democracy: U.S. Food Power, Occupied Germany, and the Origins of the Cold War (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming 2027), examines the many ways occupation authorities used food and agricultural policy as instruments of political legitimacy and Cold War strategy in postwar Germany. She is currently at work on two book projects. On the Rocks: Alcohol and the American Military Experience Overseas extends this inquiry into the politics of consumption, tracing how drinking, disorder, and discipline shaped relations between U.S. military forces and local populations from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Caribbean through the Global War on Terror. The second, tentatively titled 1948: The Wages of Victory, argues that 1948 marked the abrupt close of the postwar era, weaving 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.

O'Connell has authored essays on food as an instrument of diplomacy, the memory and mediation of atrocity in American culture, and the politics of food security from WWII to the present. She was previously Assistant Director of Yale's Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, and her research has been supported by the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (the Netherlands), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yale's Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy, the Leibniz Institute of European History  (Germany), and the German Historical Institute. In 2024, she was named a WWII Emerging Scholar by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.