Kaete O’Connell

Kaete O’Connell

Role: Deputy Director, SHAFR

Education: Ph.D., Temple University; M.A., Rutgers University-Newark; B.A., Drew University

Email: [email protected]

Biography

Kaete O’Connell oversees the organization’s annual meeting, member engagement, and communications. Her relationship with SHAFR dates back to graduate school, when she began volunteering at the annual conference. She went on to serve as Conference Coordinator Assistant in 2019 and Conference Consultant from 2022, before her appointment as Deputy Director in 2025. O’Connell brings a decade of program development experience to this work, holding positions at SMU's Center for Presidential History, Yale's Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, and the Center for the Humanities at Temple. 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.

Publications

  • Recipe for Democracy: U.S. Food Power, Occupied Germany, and the Origins of the Cold War (forthcoming 2027, UVA Press)

Awards & Honors

  • 2026–27 Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellowship, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
  • 2024 WWII Emerging Scholar, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
  • 2017 Samuel Flagg Bemis Grant