Project Co-Directors
Antonio Acevedo
Tony Acevedo is Associate Professor of History and Program Coordinator at Hudson County Community College in Jersey City, NJ. Outside of his work at HCCC, Tony has been an NEH Summer Scholar in Switzerland and Italy, a MetroCITI Fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is currently a W.W. Norton AI-Aware Faculty Fellow. He was a contributing author to Teaching and Learning History Online A Guide for College Instructors (Routledge, 2023) and was a recipient of the 2020 Dale P. Parnell Distinguished Faculty award by the American Association of Community Colleges. He is also a co-Director of the Hudson Oral History Project, which was recently awarded Insight Into Academia's 2026 Civic Engagement and Community Service Award. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in World History at St. John’s University.
Sean Egan
Sean Egan is an Assistant Professor of English at Hudson County Community College. He has more than two decades of experience teaching writing at the college level. He is the coordinator of the English Major at HCCC and the advisor to The Orator, HCCC’s student newspaper. Prof. Egan has spent his whole adult life in diverse, urban higher education settings. He began his college career, as an immigrant and first-generation college student, studying engineering at The Cooper Union in lower Manhattan. He began graduate studies in the Humanities while working as an engineer, eventually enrolling full time in the English doctoral program in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. During his graduate studies he taught at Queens College and received fellowships to advance CUNY’s writing across the curriculum. His dissertation research focused on how Walt Whitman, and other New York City- based writers, wrote about the meaning of democracy in the 19th century.
Student Interns
Gabriela Danta
Gabriela is an English Communications Major at Hudson County Community College. Outside of academics, Gabriela is a voice actor who hones in the craft towards commercial, animation, and video game voice over. During free time, Gabriela practices audio mixing, to which blossomed a passion to let the voices of oral history shine through, providing the power of the voice the treatment it deserves
Andrew Shellington
Andrew is majoring in Communication Studies at Hudson County Community College. Prior to beginning his studies, he was a member of the Canadian military where he aided in disaster response operations to combat floods and wildfires. Having lived in Jersey City since 2020, he has taken an interest in the ongoing gentrification of the urban area and how the city has changed over the past 70 years.
What We’re Doing
“Crossroads: Lifetimes around Journal Square” is the first initiative of the Hudson County Oral History Project. Our goals is to capture the dynamic changes that have taken place in Journal Square by documenting the stories of a broad range of people whose lives have been connected to the area in significant ways. Through their stories we hope to capture the area’s unparalleled diversity, its dramatic economic and demographic changes, and all of the joys, heartbreaks, triumphs, and tragedies that have come along the way.
In collecting these stories we hope to capture the distinctive character of not just one New Jersey neighborhood but of the forces that have shaped the past century of American urban life.