College: Robinson

Email: tldb2@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor: Professor Martin Crowley

Biography 

Prior to beginning his PhD, Toby obtained an undergraduate degree in French and German from University College London, studying at the Sorbonne in his third year, and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, with a thesis on aesthetic strategy and geo-politics in Franco-Algerian 'docu-fiction' (1975-2019). Toby has also worked as a translator (also in Paris) and 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 recipient of a Vice-Chancellor's Award (Cambridge Trust). 

Current research 

'The Colonial Milieu: Empire, State and the Architectonics of Modern French Scientific Thought (1830-1962)' 

Positioned at the intersection of intellectual, cultural and conceptual history, and the history of empire, Toby's doctoral research explores interactions, in 19th- and 20th-century France, between colonial politics, understandings of human life, and disciplinarity in the natural and human sciences.  

Toby's thesis presupposes that modern French thought's sustained interest in the human 'milieu' — a concept Georges Canguilhem (1952) famously described as 'a universal and obligatory mode of apprehending the experience and existence of living things' — has expressed itself as the need to negotiate between competing epistemological lenses (matter and spirit; the innate and the acquired; humanism and antihumanism, to name a few). This requirement, a product of thought's exposure to its immediate contexts — to the milieux of life — reinforces philosophy as an exercise involving choice and decision-making. In his research, Toby affirms the historical and political origins and repercussions of this dynamic, with a focus on the interaction between French philosophies of science, education and medicine, and the Second French colonial empire (1830-1962).

This historical meeting, between French 'scientific' philosophies and imperialism, Toby argues, did more than catalyse the widespread adoption of milieu as a conceptual means to understand correlations between human beings and their surroundings (milieux), for administrative and governmental ends. Rather, in its exposure to the excesses of colonial reasoning, the question of milieu would shift towards questions of race, architecture, pedagogy and nationhood. Subsequently, these changes would spark a broader probe into the changing form — and political scope — of philosophical thought, conceived as a form of action shaped by life's ethical demands; by the need, for example, to counter the excesses of industrial capitalism and its reliance on colonial exploition; or even to warn against the relativism of post-war antihumanism and the normative pitfalls of decolonisation. This lineage confronts the fundamental — and complicated — relationship between modern French intellectual culture and the French State as condition of possibility and object of critique. 

Placing figures including François-Joseph-Victor Broussais, Hippolyte Taine and Georges Canguilhem in their historical contexts, Toby's research traces imperial genealogies in modern French intellectual culture, casting light on the roles played by colonial policy in the formation — and mediation — of the modern French sciences humaines. In so doing, Toby seeks to contribute to a growing literature on the colonial histories of modern philosophical thought, and to problematise the place of colonialism in a tradition of French thinking fascinated, as Michel Foucault (1985) once characterised it, by intersections between knowledge, rationality and the history of 'despotisms'. 

Other research interests   

• Modern and contemporary French and Francophone thought and culture
• Colonialism; postcolonial studies; race; political ethics 
• Critical theory 
• Intellectual history; history of political thought; history of empire; environmental history 
• History and philosophy of science; medical humanities; historical epistemology; philosophy of history
• Hermeneutics and information theory; the 'pre-history' of cybernetics (19th-c) 
• Political geographies; architectural theory 
• 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

• 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) 

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', 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). 

In Lent Term 2024, Toby co-organised the cross-Faculty and cross-School research seminar series 'Transhistorical Humanities? Methods in Conversation'.  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 broader 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 also co-convenor of the Cambridge French Graduate Research Seminar (FGRS).