Her work focuses on the intersections between rhetoric, human rights in/and literature, and gender studies. She completed her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in August 2012 with a dissertation titled Rhetorical Approaches to Gender and Human Rights in Transnational Literature and Cultural Studies that analyzes the pedagogical and performative imperative that underwrites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent instruments, the normative culture to which this pedagogy gives rise, and the ways human rights literature participates in and speaks back to that normativity. Before coming to Wake Forest, Belinda was a research associate at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon while she completed her dissertation.