Philippe Halbert

Philippe Halbert is a PhD candidate in Yale’s History of Art department, interested in cultural exchange across the early modern Atlantic world. His dissertation explores the art and material culture of creole identity in colonial Louisiana. A specific focus of this project is centered on hygiene and various phenomena of bodily adornment, many of which relied upon commodities made in Europe and imported by way of European intermediaries. Using archaeological, archival, and visual sources from Canada, the Caribbean, Louisiana, France, and Spain, Philippe has begun to document an array of goods ranging from cosmetics and mirrors to parasols and wigs that allowed the inhabitants of settlements like New Orleans to claim a version of corporeal refinement that in many ways followed European models like the French toilette. At the same time, these items also came to play a part in competing bids for distinction and supremacy between indigenous peoples of the Lower Mississippi Valley, European immigrants and Euro-Louisianans, and free and enslaved Africans.