Rate My Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick is Professor of History at the University of Sydney, affiliated with the Discipline of History in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She earned her B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Melbourne and her D.Phil. from St Antony’s College, Oxford in 1969. Her career includes serving as Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of Russian History at the University of Chicago from 1990 to 2012, after which she became Professor Emerita. She returned to Australia in 2012, assuming the role of Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney from 2010 and Professor at the Australian Catholic University.

Fitzpatrick specializes in the social and cultural history of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, with a focus on the Stalin era, migration, displacement, and life writing. Her major publications include Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1999), Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford University Press, 1994), The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Cornell University Press, 1992), Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton University Press, 2005), The Russian Revolution (Oxford University Press, revised editions 1982, 1994, 2008, 2017), On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Melbourne University Press, 2015; co-winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, 2016), Mischka’s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s (Melbourne University Press, 2017), and White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration (Black Inc., 2021). She has edited volumes such as Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (2017), and Stalinism: New Directions (Routledge, 2000). Recognized for her contributions, she received the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction (2012), ASEEES Distinguished Contributions Award (2012), Australian Historical Association Magarey Medal for Biography for My Father’s Daughter (2012), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005), John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1988), and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Award (1987-1988). She served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (1997) and delivered the Kedourie Lecture at the British Academy (2008).