Alice Maria Santana

Alice Santana is a Ronald E. McNair fellow and a doctoral student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned her BA in Communication Sciences and Disorders with minor concentrations in African American Studies and Latin American Studies at Wayne State University. Her current areas of interest center around the perceptions and traditions of death within African American’s in the southern United States. Additionally, she studies indigenous traditions such as the Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos) and its influence on American culture. In her research, she seeks to understand how a community may play a contrasting role within the traditional Western funerary practices of the United States because of the difference of outlooks on grief and death.