Diane Shane Fruchtman received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from IU in 2014 and is currently an associate professor at Rutgers-New Brunswick. Dr. Fruchtman is a scholar of Christian thought, specializing in medieval Christianity (defining "medieval" broadly: from Constantine to Luther) and focused on the Latin west. Her research explores rhetoric and the realities it helps construct, particularly in the realms of violence and martyrdom. Her broader questions, which often take her beyond the medieval, are: How do representations of violence serve to create identities and communities? And what are the consequences of forming communities and identities through this violent imagery?

Her dissertation (“Living in a Martyrial World: Living Martyrs and the Creation of Martyrial Consciousness in the Late Antique Latin West”) examined the attempts of fifth century Latin authors to make martyrdom accessible to the masses, despite the end of official persecution. Through rhetorical techniques and outright advocacy for martyrs who did not die in persecution, Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, and Augustine of Hippo each attempted to create a new paradigm of martyrdom that did not require the martyr’s death. While their views did not ultimately prevail, the intricacies of their discourse illuminate the variety of ways that martyrdom is and can be mobilized to construct new, community-creating worldviews, and highlight the inadeqacy of scholarly definitions of martyrdom that hinge on death. She is currently working on a book, Surviving Martyrdom: Martyrdom without Death in the Late Ancient Latin West and Beyond, that will expand upon this research.

Dr. Fruchtman returned to IU in February 2025 where she gave a lecture titled, “Receiving Martyrdom: Caesarius of Arles and Augustine’s Living Martyrs.” Fruchtman explained that although generations of readers have overlooked Augustine’s understanding that martyrdom does not require death, an early admirer of his, Caesarius of Arles (468-542), understood what Augustine was arguing, agreed with it, and incorporated it into the sermons and instructions he offered his own contemporaries. But the differences between Caesarius’s presentation of living martyrdom and Augustine’s are illuminating—both because they showcase the two bishops’ differing priorities, audiences, and historical circumstances and because they press us, as scholars and historians, to think with more nuance about the transmission and reception of ideas from context to context and person to person.