Project History

The Hudson Oral History Project was created in 2023 with the goal of using oral history to document the changes that have taken place (and are still taking place) in the Journal Square neighborhood of Jersey City. This project, Crossroads: Lifetimes Around Journal Square, is ongoing, and our hope is that the collected interviews will capture the area’s dramatic economic and demographic changes and its unparalleled diversity.

The creators and co-directors of the project are both faculty at Hudson County Community College: Tony Acevedo, Associate Professor of History, and Sean Egan, Assistant Professor of English. The initial project suggested itself to us in part because it was on our doorstep: the college’s main campus is right on Journal Square in the midst of a decade’s worth of intense development. The connection to oral history came from a colleague, Joseph Gallo, the director of theatre arts at HCCC, who presented a performance of his documentary play, “Yuppies Invade My House at Dinnertime,” about gentrification in Hoboken in the 1980s (a period notorious for a series of arson-related fires that killed dozens). The play was based on press reports from the time and oral history interviews Gallo conducted. We were not going to be writing a play, but we thought the history happening around us right now ought to be preserved. We applied for and recieved an Incubation Grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, which enabled us, neither of whom had previous experience with oral history, to create this project.

In 2025, to increase our engagement with our students and their communities, we developed the Microhistories Fellowship, a program that provides students with grants and support to complete an interview-based project that that they propose as part of their applications. The initial group of fellows have an amazing line up of projects, each with different approaches to the work.

As part of the 250th anniversary year, we were invited by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities to be one of the groups representing New Jersey in the national series of programs called By the People: Conversations Beyond 250, which “explore 250 years of the nation’s cultural life and imagine its shared future.” Our project, Sports Together, explores the role that sports play in people’s identities and communities.

Grants and Awards

2026

  • By the People: Conversations Beyond 250. Selected as a program partner by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, one of four partners representing New Jersey in this national project. By the People is a series of community-driven programs created by humanities councils in collaboration with local partners. The initiative was developed by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the Smithsonian Center for Folk life and Cultural Heritage.

  • Recipient of the Insight Into Academia Civic Engagement and Community Service Award

2025

  • History Partnership Program Grant from Hudson County Office of Cultural and Heritage Affairs. Funding from this grant went to support the Microhistories Fellowship program.

2024

  • Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Selected as a grantee for this major three-year grant. (Note: This grant, scheduled to run 2025-28, was cancelled by the NEH in early 2025.)

2023

  • Incubation Grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities—the grant that enabled the initial creation of this project

Our Team

Tony Acevedo, Co-Director

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, Co-Director

Sean Egan is an Assistant Professor of English at Hudson County Community College. He is the coordinator of the English Major at HCCC. 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. While working as an engineer, he began graduate studies in the humanities eventually enrolling fulltime and earning a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Through his work on the Hudson Oral History Project, he has been awarded grants at the local, state, and federal level and received Insight Into Academia's 2026 Civic Engagement and Community Service Award.

Victoria Lenga, Student Intern (2024-26)

Victoria is an English major at Hudson County Community College (graduating in May 2026). Since she was a child, she’s always been drawn to literature—whether it be reading, creating short stories, or writing poetry. She is active in the literary activities at HCCC. In Spring 2026, she was selected as a playwright for the Garden State New Play Festival. Victoria’s work at the Hudson Oral History Project has included spearheading the project’s Instagram account, editing oral history interview transcripts, and learning about oral history methodologies and the grant application process.