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Kaete O’Connell is the Project Director for America’s First Principles, an American History and Civics summer seminar series by the U.S. Department of Education.

A historian of the United States and the world, O'Connell uses food as a lens to explore the intersection of conflict and culture—how fertilizer, beer, or a presidential state dinner can reveal the workings of power. Her first book, Recipe for Democracy: U.S. Food Power, Occupied Germany, and the Origins of the Cold War (University of Virginia Press, 2026), traces how U.S. food policy helped shape the postwar order. She is currently at work on two projects: one examines how U.S. presidents have relied on gastrodiplomacy to accomplish geopolitical objectives, and another that explores the many ways in which alcohol shaped relations between U.S. forces and local populations from Caribbean outposts at the turn of the twentieth century to the Global War on Terror.

O’Connell combines scholarly leadership with teaching and program development, serving as Deputy Director of the . Before joining ����ר��, she was Assistant Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University. Her work has been supported by the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Yale’s 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, O'Connell was named a WWII Emerging Scholar by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. She earned her PhD from Temple University.