Sheila Fitzpatrick
Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick
- Post Nominals: FAHA
- Fellow Type: Honorary Fellow
- Elected to the Academy: 1996
Biography
Sheila Fitzpatrick is a historian of modern Russia/the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and twentieth-century migration. She is a Professor at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University, Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. Her current research focusses, in an international context, on Sovietology and the end of the Cold War, and, in an Australian context, on postwar migrants from Russia, Eastern Europe and the Baltic states and anti-communism.
In 2002, she received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, and in 2012 the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction and the ASEEES Award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. Her book On Stalin’s Team was co-winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2016; her book Mischka’s War was short-listed for the same award in 2018; and her book White Russians, Red Peril was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History in 2022 (this is one of the few books of Australian history to have been translated into Russian). In 2023, she was awarded a D.Litt. by the University of Melbourne.
Her most recent single-authored book, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union (2022), appeared in four different English-language editions and been translated into fourteen languages. She is co-author and co-editor, with Mark Edele and Atina Grossmann, of Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (2017); with Ruth Balint and Joy Damousi, of When Migrants Fail to Stay (2023) and with Phillip Deery, of Russian Migrants in Cold War Australia (2024). Her new monograph, Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War, will be published by Princeton University Press in November 2024. The Death of Stalin, a short book aimed at a broader audience, will be published in the UK and Australia in April-May 2025.