Abigail Seldin

About Abigail

updated 6/2013: For her Luce year, Abigail Seldin is placed at the Hong Kong Tourism Board, working primarily for the Strategy group on Middle East and long-haul strategy. Her work for the Tourism Board included research into the presentation of Hong Kong in various markets, and exploring new ways to advertise Hong Kong to foreigners. In her spare time, she also grew her start-up, CollegeAbacus.com, with the help of a development team in Singapore. College Abacus recently won 100,000USD from the College Knowledge Challenge, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. College Abacus has been covered by CNN, CBS,  The Chronicle for Higher Education and  TechCrunch . Abigail remains a D.Phil. candidate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. She spent 2011 in Albuquerque pursuing ethnographic study of a new fringe religious movement in the American Southwest and their heritage claims. Prior to Oxford, Seldin graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania with an M.Sc. and B.A. in anthropology (simultaneous award) in May 2009. While in Philadelphia, Seldin pursued a three-year fieldwork project with a group of Lenape Native Americans who had been maintaining their heritage in secret for the previous two centuries. This work resulted in the three-year gallery exhibition, “Fulfilling a Prophecy: The Past andPresent of the Lenape in Pennsylvania,” at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Co-curated by Seldin and the Chief of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, the exhibition is the first to be co- curated by Native people at the Penn Museum, and one of the first such curatorial collaborations in the UnitedStates. The exhibition’s popularity prompted the Penn Museum to extend its initialtwelve-month run by two years before redeveloping it as a traveling exhibition.“Fulfilling a Prophecy” garnered significant press across local, national, and international markets, yielding more than 23 million impressions. As a direct result of the exhibition, the Lenape Nation has enjoyed heightened visibility and an increased number of partnerships, including recognition in the Charter of the United Nations.