Welcome to My Website
Dr. Ambika Natarajan
specializes in the history of Habsburg Central Europe. Her research focuses on how working-class women altered the discourse on labor and migration in the Habsburg Empire. She also studies empires and imperial states more broadly especially looking at the linkages between sexuality, biomedical science, and female work in the German-speaking lands. She has a PhD in the History of Science from Oregon State University, USA, graduate degrees in English and Biotechnology, and diplomas in German, French, and Creative Writing from reputed universities and institutions in India. She has experience teaching a variety of courses internationally including Bio-statistics, the History and Philosophy of Science, Science and Religion, Russian History, History of American Religions, Ethics in Science, Scientific Writing, and Communication Skills with World Literature. Her PhD dissertation won the Best Dissertation Prize from the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota, USA. Her book Servants of Culture is the 2023 Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize Finalist.
My Books
Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700-1914
(Berghahn Books, 2023)
Available from Berghahn Books
Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700-1914 (Berghahn Books, 2023)
In nineteenth century Cisleithanian Austria, poor, working-class women underwent mass migrations from the countryside to urban centers for menial or unskilled labor jobs. Through legal provisions on women’s work in the Habsburg Empire, there was an increase in the policing and surveillance of what was previously a gender-neutral career, turning it into one dominated by thousands of female rural migrants. Servants of Culture provides an account of Habsburg servant law since the eighteenth century and uncovers the paternalistic and maternalistic assumptions and anxieties which turned the interest of socio-political players in improving poor living and working conditions into practices that created restrictive gender and class hierarchies. Through pioneering analysis of the agendas of medical experts, police, socialists, feminists, legal reformers, and even serial killers, this volume puts forth a neglected history of the state of domestic service discourse at the turn of the 19th century and how it shaped and continues to shape the surveillance of women.
Editorial Reviews
This is an exceptionally detailed study of the neglected but important topic of domestic servants and the debates about them in imperial Vienna. …Anybody interested in the history of Vienna or of Habsburg Austria—or, for that matter, in the social history of labor—would find it essential reading.
-Chandak Sengoopta, Birkbeck College
This book reshapes how we think of the downfall of the Habsburg Empire, showing us an entire bourgeois society crumbling atop an outdated, untenable, paternalistic system of control. Maidservants are a brilliant illustration of this system’s failure.
-Britta McEwen, Creighton University
❞
It is notoriously difficult to write a history of those whose professional lives unfolded mainly behind closed doors, in the private spaces of bourgeois apartments, especially when these subjects leave few personal documents. Ambika Natarajan has done a remarkable job of overcoming these challenges to explore the world of household servants during the last century of Habsburg rule.
-Keely Stauter-Halsted in Austrian History Yearbook
❞
Ambika Natarajan’s Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700–1914 is an unstoppable force of scholarship. It holds itself to an extremely high standard of analytical and empirical rigor, and it delivers again and again in both regards. Every library should purchase this monograph, as should scholars interested in the fields of Habsburg studies, urban history, gender studies, and/or labor history. Professors should also readily assign this book in both undergraduate and graduate courses alike. Combining the methods of cultural, social, and legal history—all backed by an impressive array of qualitative and quantitative sources—Natarajan provides a powerful example of how history ought to be done.
-Eric Grube in German Studies Review
My Theses & Dissertations
“Electroantennogram Recordings from Wild Type and KLP64D Mutants of Drosophila Melanogaster,” (Master’s Thesis: St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai University, 2010).
“Degradation of Salicylic Acid by Pseudomonads,” (Undergraduate Honor’s Thesis: Kischinchand Chellaram College, 2007).
My Peer-Reviewed Journal Publications
01
Ambika Natarajan, “Illegitimacy, Infanticide, and Child Abuse: Maidservants and Motherhood in Nineteenth Century Vienna,” East Central Europe [Accepted].
02
Ambika Natarajan, “Two Views on Criminal Behavior,” Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift [Accepted].
03
Ambika Natarajan, “Evolution of Servant Laws in the Habsburg Empire,” Journal of Austrian Studies 57, no. 2(2024): pp. 1-35.
04
Ambika Natarajan, “Mathematics, Irony, and Ethics: Interpretations of Ambiguity in Robert Musil’s Fiction.” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, 64 (2023), pp. 311-326.
05
Ambika Natarajan, “Malariotherapy.” Current Science 123, no. 11 (December 2022): pp. 1400-1402.
06
Ambika Natarajan, “Vagrant Servants as Disease Vectors: Regulation of Migrant Maidservants in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 51 (May 2020): pp. 152-172.
My Blog Posts
01
Ambika Natarajan, “Religion as an Inheritable Trait: Attitudes towards Miscegenation in Frankish Literature and Law during the Crusades,” Medieval Studies Research Blog (blog), Medieval Institute University of Notre Dame, 30 June 2021. https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2021/06/30/religion-as-an-inheritable-trait/
02
Ambika Natarajan, “Sex and Marriage between Christians and Muslims during the Crusades,” Medieval Studies Research Blog (blog), Medieval Institute University of Notre Dame, 7 August 2020. https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2020/08/07/sex-and-marriage-between-christians-and-muslims-during-the-crusades/
My Magazine Articles
01
Ambika Natarajan, “To Kill a Whale with a Tractor: A Surreal Reason to Learn Real History,” Novellus: UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences Annual Student Magazine (2021), Issue no. 7, 35-39.
02
Ambika Natarajan, “One Story of a Great Migration,” Austrian Studies Newsmagazine 32, no. 1 (Fall 2019/Spring 2020): pp. 14-15.
03
Igor Tchoukarine and Ambika Natarajan, “Maria Theresa and Her Afterlives: An Interview with Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger,” Austrian Studies Newsmagazine 32, no. 1 (Fall 2019/Spring 2020): pp. 5-6.
04
Ambika Natarajan, “Idols Speak: Why Learn Statistics?” Palindrome: St. Xavier’s College Biotechnology Department Publication, 2012.
05
Ambika Natarajan, “The Biotech Times,” “Biotech Evolution,” Palindrome: St. Xavier’s College Biotechnology Department Publication, 2010.
06
Ambika Natarajan, “Baby Talk: An Abstract Thought on What Babies May Know,” “Stop that Violence,” “Exploring Freedom through Science: On What Science has done and Could do for Humans,” Kiran: Kishinchand Chellaram College Publication, 2007.
Check out more videos in Preview Lectures and Syllabi
The Art of Mathematics: Musings from History
This is fourth in series: History of Mathematics initiated by MSIB – The Mathematical Sciences Institute Belagavi.
The lecture entitled “The Art of Mathematics: Musings from History” was delivered by Dr. Ambika Natarajan.
Invited Talks
2023 “The New Woman and the Dead Servant-Girl: Representations of the Servant-Girl in Interwar Vienna,” Workshop on New Woman in Interwar Vienna, Online
2023 “Fundamentals of a Research Proposal,” & “Fundamentals of a Research Paper,” Intercollegiate Workshop on Research Writing and Communication, R.J. College, Ghatkopar West, Mumbai, INDIA.
2022
“Nineteenth-Century Vienna—a Hotbed of Intellectual Foment,” Interdisciplinary Intellectuals Lecture Series, R.J. College, Ghatkopar West, Mumbai, INDIA.
2021 Keynote Speaker, “The Art of Mathematics: Musings from History,” History of Mathematics Lecture Series, Mathematical Sciences Institute Belagavi, Karnataka, INDIA.
Conference Participation
Panels Organized
2019 “The Vagrant Servant as a Medical Problem in Post-1850 Vienna,” German Studies Association. [Panel Organizer and Panelist], Portland, USA.
Papers Presented
2023 “Servant Vagrancy and the Colonization of Temeswar,” Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies [Panelist], USA.
2022 “Two Views on Criminal Behavior,” History of Science Society Annual Meeting [Panelist], Chicago, USA.
2021 “The Uses of Quarantine: Diseased Bodies as a Hygiene Crisis in the Work of Sigmund Ritter von Illanor,” History of Science Society Annual Meeting [Panelist], Online.
2021 “Authentically Viennese: Culinary Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna,” Nineteenth Century Studies Association Conference [Panelist], Online.
2019 Seminar Fellows Program, Center for Austrian Studies, Minnesota, USA.
2018 “The ‘Servant Question’: Female Migration and Domestic Service in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” German Studies Association. [Panelist], Pittsburgh, USA.
My Book Reviews
01
Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World, Reviewed by Ambika Natarajan for German Politics and Society, Vol. 42, No. 3 (September 2024): pp. 89-91.
02
H. Glenn Penny, In Humboldt’s Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology, Reviewed by Ambika Natarajan for German Studies Review, Vol 47, No. 1(February 2024): pp. 159-161.
03
David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, Reviewed by Ambika Natarajan for Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 54 (May 2023): pp. 288-289.
04
Annemarie Steidl, On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire, Reviewed by Ambika Natarajan for Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 53 (May 2022): pp. 235-237.
07
“Defining a Discipline: Two Important Volumes on Synthetic Biology,” Synthetic Biology: Metaphors, Worldviews, Ethics, and Laws, edited by Joachim Boldt, Synthetic Biology: The Technoscience and its Societal Consequences, edited by Markus Schmidt, Reviewed by Ambika Natarajan for NanoEthics 10 (2016): pp. 261-263.
05
Alys X. George, The Naked Truth: Viennese Modernism and the Body, Reviewed by Ambika Natarajan for The Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 29, No. 3 (September 2020): pp. 449-451.
06
Kara L. Ritzheimer, Trash,’ Censorship, and National Identity in Early 20th Century Germany, Reviewed by Ambika Natarajan for German Politics and Society, Issue 130, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring 2019): pp. 80-82.
Fiction Books
Anika’s Kingdom of Golden Horses
(2023)
This collection of children’s stories describes some amusing events in the magical kingdom of Golden Horses that has a princess called Anika.
Leena’s Kingdom of Mystery Magic
(2023)
This collection of children’s stories describes the adventures of the inhabitants of the magical kingdom of Mystery Magic that has a princess called Leena.
Snippets from Padma Iyer’s Love Life
&
Other Stories
(2021)
A lady uses the elevator. A star academic learns to navigate life. A conservative Indian student falls in love with the most unlikely candidate. A potential murderer solves a crime. A traditional Indian couple falls apart. This collection glimpses into the changing face of urban middle-class relationships in India. Dotted with children’s stories modeled on Enid Blyton’s tales, poems that draw on personal themes, funny snippets patterned on ’50s radio shows, and dialogues patterned on popular TV serials, the book zooms in on the intrusion of serious social problems into everyday life: academic politics, bragging, confusing work environments, crime, culture shock, generation gap, hypocrisy, parental mistrust, racism, and sexual dissatisfaction.