Rivi Handler-Spitz (NHC Fellow, 2020–21)

Fellowship Work Summary, 2020–21

Rivi Handler-Spitz revised, proofread, and indexed her coedited volume The Objectionable Li Zhi: Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China, which was published by the University of Washington Press in January 2021. She also completed a chapter titled “Ming and Qing Occasional Prose: Letters and Funerary Inscriptions” for inclusion in How to Read Chinese Prose, A Guided Anthology, edited by Cai Zong-qi (Columbia University Press, forthcoming, 2022). Handler-Spitz devoted most of the year to reading and making sketches for her new project, a work of graphic scholarship tentatively titled Contentious Conversations: Masters, Disciples, and the Culture of Yulu in Late Ming China. Unlike other scholars in the fledging field of graphic scholarship, most of whom collaborate with professional illustrators, Handler-Spitz is making her own drawings. This year she has been honing her skills as a visual artist and developing the visual vocabulary to address sinological scholarship in visual-verbal format. Her drawings have been published this year in The COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology, edited by Kendra Boileau and Rich Johnson (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), Seven Days (October 28, 2020), and Corona and Work Around the Globe, edited by Andreas Eckert and Felicitas Hentschke (De Gruyter, 2021).