Tobias is a PhD student in history at Girton College, supervised by Paul Warde. He received his BA in English and history from the University of Leeds with a dissertation on the Norwegian merchant navy during the First World War. His MA dissertation in modern history at King's College London concerned British coal dependency between 1860 and 1880.

Tobias' PhD research is at the intersection between environmental history and intellectual history, bringing new perspectives to modern societies’ relationship to natural resources, technology, and infrastructure. Beginning from debates about the exhaustibility of nature, he will use English and French sources to examine the development of a new form of energy determinism at the turn of the twentieth century.