UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Wilson Kwamogi Okello, associate professor of education and director of the Black Study in Education Lab at Penn State, will discuss how Black art and cultural practices offer new ways of understanding community, resilience and flourishing in the next session of the Virtual Speaker Series, hosted by the Penn State Alumni Association. The free event will be held on Zoom on Sept. 23 from noon to 1 p.m. ET. Registration is open now.
Okello recently published his first book, “On Blackness, Liveliness, and What it Means to Be Human.” The book, which examines the intersection of history, race and identity, and what this means for the higher education context, received the 2025 American Educational Research Association Division B Outstanding Book Award. Okello has published widely and received multiple early career honors, including the 2023 Association for the Study of Higher Education Early Career Award and the 2022 American College Personnel Association Emerging Scholar recognition.
Drawing on his scholarship in Black study and aesthetics, Okello explores how creativity, relationality and everyday acts of living invite people to think differently about education and human possibility.
He defines his primary research area, Black critical studies in education, as the “belief that Black writers, thinkers and creatives have shared ideas that are useful for how we think about knowledge production, classroom environments, theory and how we think about pedagogy.” His work draws on Black critical theories to examine knowledge production, human development, and the question of what it means to be human.
The Virtual Speaker Series is one of several programs offered online by the Penn State Alumni Association. For more events and programs that will inform, educate and inspire, visit the Alumni Association’s PSAA Presents listing.
For more than 150 years, the Penn State Alumni Association has provided alumni with a strong and welcoming community representative of the Penn Staters it proudly serves. The association keeps alumni connected to the University and to each other, while upholding Penn State traditions and supporting the University’s mission of teaching, research and service. The association also produces the award-winning Penn Stater magazine and other publications, and offers alumni and friends volunteer opportunities, educational programming, and many other services. For more information about membership in the Alumni Association, visit alumni.psu.edu/youbelong.