Department of English

Academic Specialty:

• Technical and Professional Writing
• Human Rights rhetoric
• Rhetorics of resistance
• Postcolonial studies and global Anglophone literature
• Critical theory
• Cultural studies
• Transnational Feminist Rhetorics
• Rhetoric and Composition.

Education:

• Ph.D, English University of North Carolina at Greensboro 
• M.A. English Rhetoric and Composition, UNCG 
• Post-baccalaureate Certificate, Women’s and Gender Studies, UNCG
• B.A. English and Environmental Studies, Ohio Wesleyan University

Bio:

Belinda Walzer is Associate Professor of English and chair of the Rhetoric and Technical Writing program committee. She joined the Appalachian State University English Department faculty in Fall 2018. Prior to ASU, she directed the Writing Center at Northeastern University. While completing her PhD, she spent time as a Research Associate at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Walzer’s research focuses on human rights and rhetoric, rhetorics of resistance, and transnational feminist rhetorics and temporality. She has won several curriculum innovation and research grants around international higher education and social justice research. She teaches gen-ed writing, rhetoric and technical writing, rhetorical theory, advocacy writing, gender studies, human rights and rhetoric.

Selected Publications 

Books:

The Right Time: Human Rights, Temporality, and Rhetorical Invention (in progress)
How do certain kinds of violence become recognizable as human rights violations? Moreover, how do human rights claims get heard within predetermined discursive and material frames of recognition? This book takes up these questions and examines how precarious populations stake human rights claims out of impossible rhetorical situations. 

Peer Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters:

• “A Rhetoric of Everyday Violence: Embodied Slow Violence” Philosophy & Rhetoric special issue on rhetoric and violence 56.3-4 (2023).
• “Economies of Rights: Transnational Feminism, and the Transactional Structure of Rights,” Peitho 25.3 (2023)
• "Guantánamo Bay Ensigns: Material Rhetorics and Moath al-Alawi’s Ships.” Deaf Walls Speak: The Guantanamo Artwork and Testimony of Moath Al-Alwi, edited by Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
• "Novel Violence." Philosophy & Rhetoric: Special issue In the Midst of COVID-19, vol. 53 no. 3, 2020, p. 344-350.
• “Precaritization in the Security State: Ambient Akairos in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary:” Co-authored with Alexandra Moore. Precarious Rhetorics. Ed. Wendy S. Hesford; Adela C. Licona; Christa Teston. First Issue of New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality, published by The Ohio State University Press, 2018.
• "The Public Fallout of the Humanities’ Crisis: Critiquing the Public Turn in Rhetoric and Composition Studies.” Co-authored with Tonya Ritola and Mary Beth Pennington. Rendezvous Journal of Arts and Letters (Crisis in the Humanities Special Edition). Idaho State University. 43.1 (2017): 95-109.
• “The Right Time For Rhetoric: Normativity, Kairos, And Human Rights” Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Eds. Sophia McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Fall 2015:  433-440.
• “Rhetorical Approaches to Teaching Human Rights: The Pedagogy of Speak Truth to Power.” Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies. Eds. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Modern Language Association Options for Teaching Series. Fall 2015: 236-246.
• “Kairos and Comics: Reading Human Rights Intercontextually in Joe Sacco's Graphic Narratives.” Co-authored with Rose Brister. Human Rights and Cultural Forms. Spec. issue of College Literature. 40.3 (Summer 2013): 138-155.
• Boston to Beirut: Understanding an International Writing Center Collaboratory through Post-Qualitative Inquiry.” Co-written with Paula Abboud Habre. Forthcoming in collection International Writing Studies Research: Cultivating Collective Research Capacity through International Exchanges about Higher Education Writing Research, edited by Cinthia Gannett and Christiane K. Donahue with the WAC Clearinghouse International Series (Forthcoming).