Sheila Fitzpatrick

Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and the past Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago. She is an expert on twentieth-century Russia and has written six books that have transformed the field of Soviet studies, departing from Kremlinological or Cold War categories to examine the lives of ordinary Russians, from the revolutionary imperative of self-reinvention through the upheavals of collectivization and cultural revolution to the hardships and utopian visions of everyday Stalinism. In 2002, she received one of five Distinguished Achievement Awards for senior humanities scholars from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a past President of the American Association for Slavic and East European Studies.