ProfessorSheila Fitzpatrick

BA Melbourne DPhil Oxf FAHA

Sheila Fitzpatrick is primarily a historian of modern Russia, especially the Stalin period, but in recent years has added a transnational dimension with her research on Russian migration to Australia. She received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002 and the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2012. She is past President of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (formerly AAASS) and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Having worked for most of her career in the United States, she moved back to Australia in 2012.

As a historian of twentieth-century Russia, her earlier work focused mainly on Soviet social and cultural history in the Stalin period, particularly social mobility, social identity and everyday practice. Her first major study in political history: On Stalin’s Team: the Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, which uses some of the techniques of her “everyday” work, was co-published by Princeton University Press and Melbourne University Press in 2015. My Father’s Daughter, her memoir of her father, the radical historian Brian Fitzpatrick, and her childhood in Melbourne came out in 2010, and she published a memoir of life as a student in Cold War Moscow in the 1960s, A Spy in the Archives in 2012.2017 saw the appearance of her memoir-history of wartime displacement, Mischka’s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s, and a volume co-edited with Mark Edele and Atina Grossman,Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, as well as the 4^th (Centenary) edition of The Russian Revolution. Fitzpatrick’s books have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Turkish and Korean, with Chinese and Romanian translations in progress; and she writes regularly for The London Review of Books. She is co-CI (with Ruth Balint and Jayne Persian) of an ARC-funded project entitled “Postwar Russian Displaced Persons Arriving in Australia von the China Route,” and is currently working on a monograph on displacement, repatriation and resettlement after the Second World War. Her recent book, White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia was published by Black Inc in 2021 and was Shortlisted, 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Australian History. 

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