NJIT Professor's Award-Winning Album Amplifies Heroine Voices of WWII's Italian Resistance

World War II has been revisited countless times in books and films. But NJIT professor Laura Montanari set out on a unique songwriting project to bring to life overlooked voices in the Allied fight against fascism — heroines of Italy’s underground resistance.

Her new collection of “archival songs”— blending original music with interviews from female partisans (partigiane) who resisted the Nazi occupation and Fascist Italian Social Republic in the 1940s — has gained international recognition.

The research-based album and doctoral dissertation, “Songwriting Oral History Interviews: Archival Songs as Critical-Creative Pedagogy in Dialogue with Women of the Italian Resistance”, recently won the 2025 Mason Multimedia Award at the Oral History Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta.

“It was just joyful. … I wasn’t expecting the news,” said Montanari, adjunct professor at NJIT’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. “This project combines all my identities: teacher, songwriter, activist, lover of history. It’s beautiful to be seen and welcomed by communities where you usually don’t belong.”

Montanari’s creative exploration into this lesser-known chapter of Italy’s wartime past began during the pandemic, while reading a book of oral history interview transcripts by her mentor and former professor at the Università di Roma, Alessandro Portelli.

She'd reach out to the source of the transcripts, Rome’s Circolo Gianni Bosio Sound and Oral History Archive, and receive over a dozen interviews — more than 20 hours of audio, spanning decades of material collected since the 1970s.

“Some stories were familiar from published transcripts, but some of the most fascinating were those that had never been transcribed. I didn’t know what would happen next,” she said. “There’s so much more from these women that is not in printed history.”

The recordings capture voices of women who resisted the Italian Social Republic, the German-backed fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, from autumn 1943 after it took power, through the end of the war in April 1945.

Testimonies reflect women, some as young as teenagers, serving however they could to power “La Resistenza” – from combatants and spies, to medics, journalists, organizers and ordinary women sheltering fighters.

“We see all walks of life,” Montanari said. “Some taught men how to shoot guns or led in combat. Some were journalists, helping to restore democracy. Some were farmers that hid food or fighters in homes, risking everything. “It’s not only our typical idea of heroes — it’s all kinds of women, big and small acts that changed history.”

Among the stories are those from Maria Michetti, creator of the historic "Rome Open City" flyer which was posted across Rome to prevent Allied bombing of the city.

Also included was testimony from Valtera Menichetti, who recounted her key role in typing more than 30 of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s handwritten “Prison Notebooks” for publication in Italian — preserving influential works Gramsci composed between 1929 and 1935 while imprisoned by Mussolini’s regime before his death in 1937. “If we have the books today, it’s in part thanks to her,” Montanari noted.

Montanari said the interviews have received little public focus until now. Her project has attracted recent media attention from the likes of Italian national radio, RAI RADIO 3.

“Why didn’t we read about these women in school? They were left out of history books … some never recognized, or only honored decades later,” she said. “We’re paying more attention now because, in Italy, women live longer — they’re the only ones left to tell their stories. When I was growing up, we only learned about the men.”

A Songwriting Collaboration Between Partigiane, Artist and Audience

From her home recording studio, Montanari coded and analyzed the interviews to draw out recurring themes and emotional moments — collaging these audio fragments with original music to create seven archival songs inspired by the women’s accounts.

“They all talk about fear. Hunger and cold, too. They felt guilty about killing young German soldiers. Many said, ‘We did what we had to do, but would never do it again.’ Some lived with nightmares for years,” Montanari said. “If more than three women spoke about something, I brought it out in the music. I was careful not to overshadow their voices.”

With a set of tracks in-hand, Montanari next organized a free concert in collaboration with Circolo Gianni Bosio and Casa della Memoria e della Storia, where attendees listened to interviews and the new musical interpretations, then shared reactions through recorded feedback.

“I wanted to see how these songs help us understand this history,” Montanari said. “I translated their feedback and merged their impressions with the existing music, creating nine new songs. In the end, it’s a community answering questions about the past and present together.”

She describes her songwriting as “musical counter-storytelling” and “listening for social justice.”

“We need room for more voices in society. Keeping the original audio makes space for these women, literally and metaphorically,” she said. “Whenever people hear these stories, they say, ‘I didn’t know this.’ “That’s already a success. The goal is to bring it beyond academia, otherwise why do this?”

Montanari plans to rework and release the music under a new title next year, but offers a single, “Living Voices,” under her stage name Larthia, available on Bandcamp, Spotify and YouTube.

Montanari joined NJIT as a lecturer in January 2023. She teaches courses such as Music and the American Experience, using song to explore American and Caribbean history, and plans to restart a songwriting course next year.

For now, she hopes the project will help others rethink history — and who tells it.

“Oral history can be contentious, but when people actually hear these stories, it opens dialogue,” she said. “Maybe through these voices, we can start to see — and hear — history differently.”