1. Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick was born on June 4,1941 and is an Australian historian, whose main subjects are history of the Soviet Union and history of modern Russia, especially the Stalin era and the Great Purges, of which she proposes a "history from below", and is part of the "revisionist school" of Communist historiography.
Sheila Fitzpatrick has critically reviewed the concept of totalitarianism and highlighted the differences between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in debates about comparison of Nazism and Stalinism.
Sheila Fitzpatrick is considered a founder of the field of Soviet social history.
Sheila Fitzpatrick was born in Melbourne in 1941, the daughter of Australian author Brian Fitzpatrick and his second wife Dorothy Mary Davies.
Sheila Fitzpatrick attended the University of Melbourne and received her doctorate from St Antony's College, Oxford, with a thesis entitled The Commissariat of Education under Lunacharsky.
Sheila Fitzpatrick was a Research Fellow at the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies from 1969 to 1972.
Sheila Fitzpatrick is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Sheila Fitzpatrick is a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the American Association for Slavic and Eastern European Studies.
From September 1996 to December 2006, Fitzpatrick was co-editor of The Journal of Modern History with John W Boyer and Jan E Goldstein.
In 2012, Sheila Fitzpatrick received both the award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the American Historical Association's award for Scholarly Distinction, the highest honour awarded in historical studies in the United States.
In 2016, Sheila Fitzpatrick won the Prime Minister's Award for non-fiction for her book On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics.
Sheila Fitzpatrick won the 2012 Magarey Medal for biography for her memoir My Father's Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood.
In 2017, Sheila Fitzpatrick published a memoir-biography of her late husband Michael Danos, Mischka's War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s, which was short-listed for the Prime Minister's Award for non-fiction in 2018.
Since her return to Australia, in addition to continuing her research and writing on Soviet history, such as On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, Sheila Fitzpatrick has been working and publishing on Australian immigration, particularly displaced persons after World War II and during the Cold War, such as White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia.
Sheila Fitzpatrick's research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Stalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life, and the social and cultural changes in Soviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s.