College: Robinson

Email: tldb2@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor: Professor Martin Crowley

Biography 

Toby obtained his BA in French and German from University College London, studying at the Sorbonne during his third year, and later took an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, with a thesis on aesthetic strategy and geo-politics in Franco-Algerian 'docu-fiction'. Toby has worked as a translator (also in Paris) and also studied in Germany, at the Universität zu Köln.

In 2022, Toby returned to Cambridge as Crausaz-Wordsworth Scholar in the Humanities at Robinson College, where he is also the recipient of a Vice-Chancellor's Award from the Cambridge Trust. He is currently Postgraduate Officer for the Society for French Studies, the foremost learned association for French and Francophone Studies in the UK and Ireland.  

Research

Toby's doctoral thesis adopts an interdisciplinary approach combining intellectual history, the history of the sciences, postcolonial studies, and the history of empire to explore connections between republican and colonial politics and philosophies of life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, with a precise focus on the concept of 'milieu'. 

As the writings of French historian, philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995) have made clear, the malleable (and perhaps 'untranslatable') concept of milieu has offered 'a universal and obligatory mode of apprehending the experience and existence of living things' to thinkers in a diverse range of sub-fields across the 'human sciences', including biology, medicine, psychology, public instruction, and epistemology [1]. Taking Canguilhem's observations as its point of departure, Toby's thesis constructs a genealogy of milieu that illuminates its history as, first, a French-specific concept, and second, as a theoretical cornerstone of French republican ideology and its colonial activities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

The convergence of philosophy, the French republican state, and imperialism, Toby argues, did more than catalyse the commonplace adoption of milieu as a theoretical and administrative tool for understanding and regulating how human beings shape — and are shaped by — their environment. Through its exposure to the shifting strategies of French republicanism and colonial governance, milieu would generate fresh questions of race and citizenship, and engender a number of significant intellectual responses to republican excess. Motivated by civic reason, human rights, and resistance to state oppression, these counter-trends would later assume a central place at the heart of the modern French philosophical canon, in the state institutions from which this undoubtedly emerged. A contextual re-evaluation of physicians, political scientists, philosophers and philosophy teachers, such as François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, Émile Boutmy, Alain, Félicien Challaye, Simone Weil and Canguilhem, Toby's thesis charts a series of distinct conjunctures in the political consciousness of modern France. Moving beyond the postcolonial critiques of French philosophy mounted by Robert Young to assert the role of the republic in shaping the colonial histories of modern French intellectual culture (a subject on which there is an ever-growing literature, e.g., Geoghegan 2022, Steinmetz 2023, Erdur 2024, Hoquet 2025), it illuminates a neglected tradition of thinking that sought to disentangle scientific knowledge, rationality, and the 'history of despotisms', as Michel Foucault once put it [2].

[1. Georges Canguilhem, 'Le vivant et son milieu', in La connaissance de la vie (Vrin: [1952] 1992), 129-197; 2. Michel Foucault, 'La vie : L'expérience et la science', in Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 90 année, No.1 (1985), 3-14]  

Other research interests   

• Modern and contemporary French and Francophone thought and culture
• Intellectual history; history of political thought; history of empire; environmental history 
• Colonialism; postcolonial studies; race 
• History and philosophy of science; 'historical epistemology'; philosophy of history
• Critical theory 
• Medical humanities 
• Hermeneutics and information theory; the 'pre-history' of cybernetics (19th-c) 
• Political geographies and architecture 
• Cultural materialism and the work of Raymond Williams. 

Publications

• (Forthcoming 2025) 'Georges Canguilhem's Critique of Medical Reason: Healthcare, Relativism and the (Anti-)Colonial', in L'Esprit Créateur (Special issue: 'Future Worlds of Health: Speculative Methodologies, Medical Humanities, and French and Francophone Cultures'). 
• 2024. 'Catherine Malabou's Historical Epistemology', in Paragraph, 47.2, pp.162-177. https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2024.0460. 
• 2022. ‘Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s Terminal Sud (2019) and the resurgence of a Franco-Algerian archive’, in Expressions maghrébines, 21. 2, pp. 171-189. https://doi.org/10.1353/exp.2022.0027. 

Awards, Scholarships and Prizes

• Odette de Mourgues Award - University of Cambridge (2025) 
• Peter Bayley Award - University of Cambridge (2024) 
• Vice-Chancellor’s Award - Cambridge Trust (2022-2025) 
• Crausaz Wordsworth Scholarship in Humanities - Robinson College, Cambridge (2022-2025) 
• Research Award - Institute of International Visual Art (Iniva) (2021) 
• Jennings Prize - Wolfson College, Cambridge (2021) 

Teaching

(Course supervisor)

•  FRB2 - Translation from French 
•  FR6 - Innovation and Upheaval: deformation and reformulation in the 20th and 21st centuries 
•  FR12 - Ethics and experience: literature, thought, and visual culture of the French-speaking world (1900 to the present) 
• Foundation Year Dissertation projects 

(Seminar leader and course co-ordinator)

• Critical Theory (Tripos Parts IA, IB, and II; on behalf of Trinity, Corpus Christi, Queens', Gonville & Caius, Jesus, Robinson and Trinity Hall) 

Toby welcomes enquiries from students wishing to carry out undergraduate dissertation projects relevant to his research interests. 

Selected Papers and *Invited Talks

• 'The Racial Symptom: François-Joseph-Victor Broussais's Algerian Legacy (Or, Re-reading the Colonial History of Science)', Twenty-third Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-neuvièmistes (DomiNation), Durham University, UK, 31 March 2025.
• *'La pathologie positive: François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, Algeria and the Problem of Adaptability', University of Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College, Oxford, UK, 28 May 2024. 
• 'Form and Function at the Historical Limit: New Modes of Rationality in Contemporary French Thought', Society for French Studies (SFS) Graduate Conference, King's College London, London, UK, 19 May 2023. 
• ''Memory Supports' and 'Agents of Belief': The Technical Economy of Culture in Bernard Stiegler's La technique et le temps (1994-2001) and Marie-José Mondzain's Image, Icône, Economie (1996)', Robinson College, Cambridge MCR/SCR Conference, Cambridge, UK, 28 January 2023. 
• *'Culture as Technology: Technical Affinities in the Work of Bernard Stiegler and Marie-José Mondzain', Cambridge French Graduate Research Seminar, Cambridge, UK, 2 December 2022.
• ‘Kader Attia and Colonial Repair’, Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), Future Collect Conference: Handle with Care, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, 25 November 2021.  

• Panel chair for ‘(Post)colonial Legacies' session, University of Cambridge French Graduate Conference, University of Cambridge, 13 January 2023.

Outreach

Since 2022, Toby has delivered outreach sessions on behalf of the Cambridge MMLL Faculty, which have seen him share research with prospective undergraduate applicants in Modern Languages (17-18), and teachers of French A-Level: 

• 'Film between France and Algeria: Rabah Ameur-ZaÏmeche', Diversity in French and Francophone Studies: A CPD workshop for teachers of French. University of Cambridge / Association of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF). 20 February 2023.   
• ‘La rencontre Algérie-France: Aesthetic Strategy in Terminal Sud (2019) and La Bataille d’Alger (1966)’. Why Not Languages? @ Cam, University of Cambridge. 21 June 2022. 

Other projects, activities and roles

In Summer 2024, Toby joined the Executive Committee of The Society for French Studies, taking up the role of Postgraduate Officer. In 2023-24, Toby was the Society's Conference Assistant and co-organiser, with Dr Kate Foster (QMUL), of the 65th Society for French Studies Annual Conference (University of Stirling, 1st-3rd July 2024). Toby is the current organiser of the Society's Annual Postgraduate Conference (King's College London, 30 May 2025), and co-organiser of the University of Cambridge French Graduate Conference, on 'Contextual Dilemmas in French and Francophone Studies' (King's College, Cambridge, 22 April 2025). 

In Lent Term 2024, Toby co-organised the cross-Faculty and cross-School research seminar series 'Transhistorical Humanities? Methods in Conversation' together with Carlos Iglesias-Crespo.  Funded by the MMLL Faculty Cross-Faculty Research Seminar fund and held at King's College, Cambridge, the series brought together leading academics working across languages and historical time periods to reflect on questions of method, historicity and disciplinarity, and their relation to the contemporary humanities. 

Since 2022, Toby has been co-convenor, alongside Professor Emma Wilson and Maddison Sumner, of the Cambridge Modern French Research Seminar (MFRS); in 2023-24, he was co-convenor of the Cambridge French Graduate Research Seminar (FGRS).