An in conversation between Giulia Smith, Historian in Residence and Lesley Hall, Historian and the archivist of the Peckham Experiment Archive held at the Wellcome Library.

Giulia Smith specialises in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on ecological aesthetics in Britain and the USA. Her research deals primarily with questions of technology, materiality, politics, subjectivity, community, wellbeing and welfare. She is currently affiliated with the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, London. In 2016, she received her PhD from the History of Art Department at University College London. Between 2016–17, Giulia was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. Previously she was Editorial Assistant at Oxford Art Journal. She has organised public programmes with ICA, Showroom, Tate, South London Gallery and Arcadia Missa, London. She has contributed articles to British Art Studies, Oxford Art Journal, Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, Object, Art Monthly, Frieze, ModernMatter and This Is Tomorrow.

Lesley A Hall, PhD, FRHistS, DipAA, was Senior Archivist at the Wellcome Library for many years until she retired. While there she had a long involvement with the archives of the Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham, including primary responsibility for cataloguing the collection. She has published on the Centre and its archives and more generally on interwar initiatives in community and health, and also on questions of gender, sexuality, and birth control. She is now a Wellcome Library Research Fellow and an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London.