The Organization of American Historians is holding their 2016 conference in Providence. The conference theme is “Leadership in America”, so on that basis I guess there might be room to shoehorn Lovecraft in there? Which would be fitting, as the conference will be in Providence.

Perhaps a paper titled something like… ‘Corresponding Leaderships: H. P. Lovecraft as leader of the amateur journalism movement’. Looking not at the tedious minutiae of the posts he occupied and the twist and turns of his leaderships-by-correspondence, but at Lovecraft as an example of the sort of people who gained skills from leading an autonomous literary open movement that was — perhaps for the first time in world history — outside of religion or party/single-issue politics, free of pre-publication censorship, and which consciously tried to overcome boundaries (gender, income, education, and geography) between members.