Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick

Sheila Mary Fitzpatrick (born 4 June 1941) 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. She has also 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.

Fitzpatrick is professor at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne), honorary professor at the University of Sydney, and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago.

Prior to this, she taught Soviet history at the University of Texas at Austin and was the Bernadotte Everly Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She is considered a founder of the field of Soviet social history.

Family

Sheila Fitzpatrick was born in Melbourne in 1941, the daughter of Australian author Brian Fitzpatrick and his second wife Dorothy Mary Davies.

 Her younger brother was the historian David P. B. Fitzpatrick.

Fitzpatrick's first marriage to Alex Bruce, a fellow University of Melbourne student, soon ended. Her second marriage to the political scientist Jerry F. Hough, from 1975 to 1983, ended in divorce.

While living in the United States, Fitzpatrick married the theoretical physicist Michael Danos (1922-1999)