J.R. Osborn

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United States (residence) °1975
research interests: MediaArtHistories, Semiotics, graphic design, diagram, museum, VISUAL CULTURE
affiliation: Georgetown University
orcid: 0000-0001-5622-022X
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J.R. Osborn is a scholar and experimentalist of communication. His work explores media history, semiotics, communication technologies, visual culture, and design aesthetics with a regional focus of the Middle East and Africa. Dr. Osborn is currently an Associate Professor of Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) and Co-Director of Technology Design Studio and Iteration Lab at Georgetown University. He has written a number of arcuitles on Arabic typography history, Ottoman printing, and the interactions of Arabic script and technology. His book Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (2017, Harvard University Press) won the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Albert Hourani Best Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). The book follows the story of Arabic script and technology, from the advent of calligraphic tradition in the tenth century through the implementation of the Unicode computer standard in the twentieth century. Dr. Osborn and Bennetta Jules-Rosette co-authored African Art Reframed: Dialogues and Reflections on Museum Culture (2020, University of Illinois Press), which analyzes the global circulation of African art through extensive curator interviews, ethnographic site visits, the "unmixing" of artworks, and studies of audience response. He is currently exploring and collecting significant diagrams from manuscripts and early printed works for the Diagrammatica archive.

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research expositions (collaborated)

  • Beneath the Steel: Chinese Railroad Workers, Lost Histories, and Art as Remembrance (2025) author(s): Haoqing Yu, J.R. Osborn published in: Research Catalogue
    The histories, stories, and names of Chinese railroad workers who dedicated their lives to constructing the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad have remained in the shadows for over a century. Completed in 1869, the railroad was a monumental achievement in America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ during the nineteenth century. But despite their contributions, the Chinese laborers have not received the recognition they deserve. This project seeks to remember Chinese railroad workers via arts-based research methods (ABR). Archives are not merely repositories of the past but also products of political power. In this light, the project poses a key methodological question: How can art-making critically reconfigure the power of archives and lost history? We seek to ask questions, initiate a dialogue, acknowledge the absence, and give form to the invisible. Building upon the historical recovery work of previous scholars, we reconstruct fragmented pieces through remixed artworks. The current article highlights key artworks that demonstrate the scope and variety of a much larger project (Yu 2025b). We dedicate this work to the Chinese master railroad builders––to the great-grandfathers––whose stories and names demand remembrance.
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