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 a PhD candidate and Crausaz-Wordsworth Scholar in the Humanities at Robinson College, where he also holds 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: 'Republican Metabolisms: Empire, State and Milieu in Modern French Thought'   

Toby’s research centres on the intellectual history of republicanism, empire, and institutional thought in modern France and the francophone world. His doctoral thesis focuses on the debates that shaped medical, anthropological, legal, religious and philosophical ideas of the relationship between human beings and their environments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on the historical semantics of Barbara Cassin and Raymond Williams, Toby traces a genealogy of the untranslatable ‘keyword’ milieu, identifying the so-called ‘metabolism’ of life and its surroundings as the ideological driving force behind the co‑development of the modern French state and its colonial projects in the period spanning 1830 and 1973. 

He explores this topic through the work of key figures and intellectual groups understudied in the anglophone world, including, most notably, François Broussais, a revolutionary physician and source of Auguste Comte’s doctrine of postivism; the Société d’anthropologie de Paris; Émile Boutmy, a political theorist and founder of the École libre des sciences politiques; Jules Lagneau, Paul Desjardins and the Union pour l’action morale; and the historian and philosopher of science, Georges Canguilhem. Re-evaluating their activities through the lens of key political conjunctures, such as the French invasion of Algeria, the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, and the Algerian War of Independence, he illuminates a 'republican fracture' in the historiography of modern French intellectual culture that continues to inflect institutional attitudes towards colonial histories, in France and its former colonies alike. 

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; histories of enslavement  
• History and philosophy of science; 'historical epistemology'; philosophy of history
• Critical theory 
• Medical humanities; Institutional Psychotherapy (Tosquelles, Oury, Guattari, Fanon, Canguilhem)  
• Hermeneutics and information theory; cybernetics in the nineteenth century
• Political geography and architecture 
• Cultural Studies; cultural materialism; the work of Raymond Williams. 

Publications

• (Forthcoming 2025) 'Georges Canguilhem's Critique of Medical Reason: Healthcare, Relativism and (Anti-)Colonial History', 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, Grants, Scholarships and Prizes

• Conference Grant - The Society for French Studies (2025) 
• Odette de Mourgues Award - University of Cambridge (2025) 
• Peter Bayley Award - University of Cambridge (2024) 
• Cross-Faculty Research Seminar Grant - Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics Faculty, 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

• 'Regulation, Relativism and the Colonial in Georges Canguilhem's Philosophy of Science', 66th Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies, University of Bristol, UK, 2 July 2025. 
• '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.  

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 2025, Toby organised the Society's Annual Postgraduate Conference ('Conditions', King's College London, 30 May 2025), co-organised the University of Cambridge French Graduate Conference ('Contextual Dilemmas in French and Francophone Studies', King's College, Cambridge, 22 April 2025), and was a member of the organising committee of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Postgraduate Study Day ('Colonial Toxicity and Ecologies of Empire', Buckingham House, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, 23 May 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. Titled 'Cognition Across Time', the third session gave rise to Professor Emma Gilby's new book, 'Descartes and the Non-Human' (CUP, 2025). 

Between 2022 and 2025, Toby was co-convenor, alongside Professor Emma Wilson and Maddison Sumner, of the Cambridge Modern French Research Seminar (MFRS), a forum hosting talks by speakers such as Giuliana Bruno, Samia Henni, Myriam Moïse, Antoine de Baecque, and Chantal Jaquet; in 2023-24, he was co-convenor of the Cambridge French Graduate Research Seminar (FGRS).