Jan Osborn

An alumnus of the University of Michigan and the University of California, Riverside, Dr. Jan Osborn is an Emeritus English Professor at Chapman University where she taught composition, linguistics, and rhetoric and was a faculty member in the Smith Institute of Political Economy and Philosophy, collaborating with the director to develop the Humanomics program, intersecting literature with philosophy and economics. Prior to to Chapman, Jan taught English in secondary public schools in Los Angeles and Orange County, California; she also taught English at community colleges in Michigan and California, providing reading and writing opportunities for students from diverse socio-economic and ethnic communities.

In addition to classroom practice, Jan has been an active community engagement leader and ambassador. As director of the Chapman University / Orange High School Literacies Partnership, which included the John Fowles Center’s Young Writers’ Workshop, she worked with local high school students to foster an authentic, sustained opportunity to develop reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. As co-director of the Orange County Literary Society Collaborative, Jan worked with community colleges in LA and OC to introduce their students to contemporary authors, developing literacies through engaged reading and writing. At the university, Jan was also co-director of Underground Panthers, a comprehensive program to serve formerly incarcerated juveniles who may not have envisioned themselves as college students. In Summer 2024, Jan served as the writing coordinator for a NSF grant, Pathways to STEM, where she worked with community college students learning to write policy briefs in environmental science. Jan continues to participate in the annual Humanomics Alumni Colloquium, a robust means of providing reading and discussion opportunities for students after graduation and in addition to the intellectual focus in their careers.

Jan’s scholarship has focused on Humanomics, discourse analysis, multilingual literacies and rhetoric, and the intersections of visual and verbal rhetorical choices in graphic fiction and nonfiction and digital media. Her work with Aesthetic Education continues to inform her scholarship, including introducing sketchbook journaling as a literacy practice to students from fifth grade through the university.

Jan’s book Community Colleges and First-Generation Students: Academic Discourse in the Writing Classroom was published in 2015. She has numerous publications in academic journals ranging from motherhood studies to language and literary analysis. In addition, she is a member of the Bennett Avenue Writers Group and publishes poetry in literary journals as part of her creative life.