College: Robinson

Email: tldb2@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor: Professor Martin Crowley

Thesis title: 'Republican Metabolisms: Empire, State and Milieu in Modern French Thought'   

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'. In 2022, Toby returned to Cambridge as 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.  

Beyond his academic research and teaching in French and Francophone Studies, Toby has worked as a translator (in Paris) and copywriter (in the UK). He has also studied in Germany, at the Universität zu Köln.

Research

Toby’s research centres on the intellectual history of republicanism, empire, and institutional thought in modern France and the francophone world. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, metropolitan France and its former colonies, Toby's doctoral thesis spotlights the medical, anthropological, legal, religious, and philosophical debates that shaped understandings of what he describes, after Karl Marx’s well-known phrasing, as the ‘metabolic’ relationship between humans and their environments. A recurring question of interest for the modern French 'human sciences', this relationship was more than an abstract interest confined to high philosophical and academic discourses: rather, it functioned as a theoretical battleground on which real-world linkages between the individual and society, the citizen and the state, and the particular and the universal were moulded, contested, and reformulated. 

Drawing on the historical semantics of Raymond Williams and Barbara Cassin, Toby reconstructs a genealogy of the concept of milieu, a ‘keyword’ or ‘untranslatable’ that stresses the central role played by ideas about life and its surroundings in the reciprocal development of the French Republic, the second French colonial empire, and the 'human sciences' in the years 1830 to 1973. This co-evolution, Toby shows, produced new and interconnected forms of abstract thinking and political practice with unprecedented significance for the self-understanding and institutional structure of one of Europe’s foremost imperial states.  

Toby explores this topic via the work of key figures and intellectual groups that have escaped attention in the anglophone world, including, most notably, François Broussais, a revolutionary physician, and the forgotten influence behind 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 crucial political conjunctures, such as the French invasion of Algeria, the Paris Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, and the Algerian War of Independence, and building upon recent work in the history of empire, political theory, and environmental thought, he seeks to illuminate the 'republican fracture' at the heart of modern French intellectual culture and its historiographies in the present day. 

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 
• Hermeneutics and information theory; cybernetics in the nineteenth century
• Populism and agrarianism in modern French literature and culture 
• Political geography and architecture 
• Cultural Studies; cultural materialism; Raymond Williams. 

Publications

• (Forthcoming 2025) 'Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Regulation: Colonialism, Institutions, and Medical Justice', 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. (*Winner of Paragraph prize for Best Article of 2023/24; also featured in The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 32.1) 
• 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

• Prize for Best Article of 2023/24 - Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory (2025) 
• 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 (2022-2026) 
• 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).