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 in Paris 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

Thesis title: 'The Colonial Milieu: Empire, State and the Architectonics of Modern French Thought' 

Combining the approaches of intellectual history, the history of empire, and the history of the sciences, Toby's doctoral research explores linkages between colonial politics, philosophies of human life, and political regulation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, with a focus on the intellectual -- and colonial -- lifespan of a particular concept: milieu. 

As the work of French historian, philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem has made clear, milieu offered to thinkers of medicine, education and science 'a universal and obligatory mode of apprehending the experience and existence of living things' (La connaissance de la vie, 1952). Taking Canguilhem's observations as its point of departure, Toby's thesis constructs a genealogy that understands milieu not only as a French-specific concept, but as a cornerstone of French republican -- and thus French colonial -- ideology. The historical meeting between philosophy, imperialism and the French republican state, Toby argues, did more than catalyse the widespread adoption of milieu as a means to understand how human beings shape -- and are shaped by -- their surroundings (milieux), often for administrative and regulatory ends. Rather, through its exposure to the excesses of colonial governmentality, milieu would generate new questions centred around race and citizenship, and give rise to intellectual counter-trends interrogating reason, action, and resistance to state oppression. 

Placing figures including François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, Émile Boutmy, Alain, Félicien Challaye, and Georges Canguilhem in their historical contexts, Toby's work contributes to a growing literature on the colonial histories of modern French thought by honing in on a foundational tradition of thinking concerned, as Michel Foucault once characterised it, by intersections between knowledge, rationality and the history of 'despotisms' (La vie : L'expérience et la science, 1985). 

Other research interests   

• Modern and contemporary French and Francophone thought and culture
• Critical theory 
• Colonialism; postcolonial studies; race 
• Intellectual history; history of political thought; history of empire; environmental history 
• History and philosophy of science; 'historical epistemology'; philosophy of history
• 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

• 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

• *'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 co-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).