Rivi Handler-Spitz

Rivi Handler-Spitz studies, teaches, and writes and draws about Chinese literature, comparative literature, and cultural and intellectual history. 

Currently a Getty Scholar in residence in Los Angeles, she is researching, writing, and drawing a book-length graphic narrative on the international and racial history of Chinese script reform. One chapter, “Savage Script: How Chinese Writing Became Barbaric”, appeared in Global Anti-Asian Racism (Columbia University Press, 2024). This podcast interview (in Mandarin) outlines her ongoing work on the project. This work has also received fellowship funding from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the British Academy.

Other recent and forthcoming articles by Rivi Handler-Spitz explore the ethical dimensions of teacher-student relationships in late imperial China as depicted in Ming dynasty Neo-Confucian “recorded sayings” (語錄 yulu), collections of verbal exchanges between teachers and students assembled and published by disciples after the death of their teacher. These scholarly articles grow out of Rivi’s research as a National Humanities Center Fellow, which she discusses here.

Her monograph Symptoms of an Unruly Age: Li Zhi and Cultures of Early Modernity (University of Washington Press, 2017) compares writings by the late Ming dynasty radical intellectual Li Zhi (李贄 1527-1602) to works by several of his best-known European contemporaries including Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Cervantes. Writing independently on opposite ends of Eurasia, each of these authors grappled with quintessentially early modern questions such as how to distinguish truth from falsity in an increasingly disorienting yet interconnected world. By examining rhetorical similarities among the texts themselves and highlighting analogies between the historical contexts in which they were produced, Symptoms of an Unruly Age argues that Li Zhi’s writings merit interpretation in a global early modern context.

Rivi Handler-Spitz has also translated Li Zhi’s essays from classical Chinese in A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden) (Columbia University Press, 2016). Here is an interview in which she and her co-editors on this volume, Haun Saussy and Pauline C. Lee, talk about the book. Along with Pauline C. Lee and Haun Saussy, she has also co-edited The Objectionable Li Zhi: Fiction, Criticism, and Dissent in Late Ming China (University of Washington Press, 2021). This book analyzes Li Zhi’s writings from the perspectives of religious studies, women’s studies, book history, intellectual history, and literary criticism. The editors of this volume discuss the book here. 

Rivi Handler-Spitz began studying Mandarin and Classical Chinese at Columbia University, where she earned an AB in Comparative Literature (Chinese, French, and Latin). She also studied modern and classical Chinese in Mainland China, Taiwan, and the University of Chicago, where she completed her PhD, also in Comparative Literature. Before joining the faculty at Macalester, she taught courses on Chinese language and literature, world literature, and comparative literature at the University of Chicago, Brown University, and Middlebury College.

At Macalester, she has taught the following courses:

• Cramming for the Exam: Education in Chinese Literature and History
• Opulence and Decadence: China, Europe, and the Early Modern World 
• Asian Humanities: Adaptations and Appropriations
• Cross-Cultural Encounters: China and the West
• Literature and Social Reform in Modern China
• Masterpieces of Chinese Literature
• Teachers and Students
• The Art of Writing in China
• China on the Map
• Literature and the Arts of Empire 
• Women, Warriors, Secrets, and Snakes
• Chinese 101