[2] Fitzpatrick attended the University of Melbourne (BA, 1961) and received her doctorate from St Antony's College, Oxford (1969), with a thesis entitled The Commissariat of Education under Lunacharsky (1917–1921).

[5] In 2016, Fitzpatrick won the Prime Minister's Award for non-fiction for her book On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (2015).

In 2017, Fitzpatrick published a memoir-biography of her late husband Michael Danos, Mischka's War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s, which was short-listed for the Prime Minister's Award for non-fiction in 2018.

[5] Fitzpatrick has been awarded Discovery Grants by the Australian Research Council for joint projects in 2010 with Stephen G. Wheatcroft for Rethinking the History of Soviet Stalinism, in 2013 with Mark Edele for War and Displacement: From the Soviet Union to Australia in the Wake of the Second World War, and in 2016 with Ruth Balint and Jayne Persian for Postwar Russian Displaced Persons arriving in Australia via the China Route.

[12][13][14] Writing in The American Historical Review, Roberta T. Manning reviewed Fitzpatrick's work, stating: "In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sheila Fitzpatrick almost singlehandedly created the field of Soviet social history with an impressive series of pioneering, now classic studies: The Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (1978), Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (1979), and The Russian Revolution (1982).

[19] For Fitzpatrick, the "cultural revolution" of the late 1920s and the purges which shook the scientific, literary, artistic, and the industrial communities is explained in part by a class struggle against executives and intellectual bourgeois.

The men who rose in the 1930s played an active role to get rid of former leaders who blocked their own promotion, and the Great Turn found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit.

[20] In this vision, Stalinist policy was based on social forces and offered a response to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the regime and society in the 1930s.

Without calling them "totalitarian", they identified their common features, including genocide, an all-powerful party, a charismatic leader, and pervasive invasion of privacy; however, they stated that Nazism and Stalinism did not represent a new and unique type of government but rather can be placed in the broader context of the turn to dictatorship in Europe in the interwar period.

[24] Matt Lenoe described the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong.