Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 5.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2026-05-12 09:34:32+00:00
From: Glenn Roe <glenn.roe@humanities.ox.ac.uk>
Subject: CFP - Retooling Intertextuality - Paris September 14-15
Dear Colleagues,
We are delighted to invite submissions for the international conference
'Retooling Intertextuality: Digital Humanities and Textual Scholarship’ to be
held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris September 14-15 2026. Full call
for participation is below and here<https://modern.huma-num.fr/cfp-retooling-
intertextuality/>. Happy to field any questions about the event and its subject
matter as needed.
Many best regards,
Glenn Roe, Michael Sinatra, Dario Nicolosi
-----
Call for Participation
Retooling Intertextuality: Digital Humanities and Textual Scholarship
14–15 September 2026
Salle des Actes, École normale supérieure, Paris
From its earliest theoretical formulations, intertextuality has established
itself as one of the most productive concepts in literary and cultural studies.
From the foundational work of Julia Kristeva (1969) and Roland Barthes (1974) to
the synthesising perspectives of Nathalie Piégay-Gros (1996) Tiphaine Samoyault
(2010), and Graham Allen (2022), it has sustained critical debate across
generations of scholarship. Conceived at times in a narrow sense — focused on
the identification of explicit, traceable textual content such as quotations,
adaptations, and parodies — and at others in a broader sense encompassing
allusions, implicit references, and generic, cultural, or linguistic frameworks,
intertextuality remains a theoretically mobile object. The range of possible
relations between hypotext and hypertext, as articulated most influentially by
Gérard Genette (1982), continues to animate research across diverse corpora,
from ancient to contemporary, in both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.
In recent years, the digital humanities have lent new momentum to these
inquiries. A number of projects have sought to mobilise computational methods,
corpus analysis tools, visualisation techniques, and distant reading approaches
to study the various forms of intertextuality and textual rewriting. Some
researchers have explored parodic rewriting and pastiche, drawing on generative
models to produce new instances of these forms (Dinu et al. 2025). Others have
applied large-scale citation analysis to illuminate the reception of authors and
works (Rosson et al. 2023; Roe 2024; Nicolosi 2026), while several studies have
sought to trace textual influences and circulations across linguistic and
historical boundaries (Reboul 2022; Gawley 2024). More broadly, as Andrew Coffee
and collaborators demonstrated (Coffee et al. 2012; Coffee 2018), digital
humanities have contributed to renewing the analytical frameworks for
intertextual phenomena, even as their theorisation remains a work in progress.
The reflections of Mellerin and Büchler (2017), Forstall and Scheirer (2019),
and Baron (2021) have further underscored the need to articulate tools, methods,
and concepts more rigorously.
Against this backdrop, it seems timely to collectively examine what digital
humanities contribute to the study of intertextuality. What do digital tools
actually enable in the analysis of quotations, allusions, pastiches, parodies,
plagiarism, and more diffuse textual filiations? To what extent do they
transform not only our research practices, but also the theoretical categories
through which we understand intertextuality, rewriting, and literary influence?
What new knowledge do they make possible, and what methodological, hermeneutic,
or critical limits do they reveal?
This colloquium aims to bring together researchers who draw on digital
humanities methods or tools to study intertextuality, textual rewriting, and
literary influence, or who wish to reflect on the epistemological effects of
these approaches on the definition of their objects of inquiry. It seeks to
foster dialogue across empirical work, methodological proposals, theoretical
reflection, and critical assessment of digital practices.
Topics
Proposals may address, among others, one or more of the following areas:
* Computational detection and analysis of quotations, adaptations,
allusions, pastiches, parodies, or plagiarism;
* Intertextual relations in large-scale, multilingual, or diachronic
corpora;
* Visualisation, mapping, and modelling of textual networks;
* Critical reflection on the categories of intertextuality, rewriting,
influence, hypertextuality, or literary tradition in the digital age;
* Uses of large language models in the analysis, simulation, or production
of rewriting phenomena.
The colloquium welcomes proposals from a range of disciplines, including
literary studies, comparative literature, linguistics, cultural studies, book
history, media studies, information science, and digital humanities, as well as
contributions at the interface with computer science or natural language
processing.
Submission Guidelines
Proposals of 250–300 words, in French or English, accompanied by a brief bio-
bibliographical note indicating institutional affiliation, should be submitted
by 1 June 2026 to:
glenn.roe@ens.psl.eu
dario.nicolosi.92@gmail.com
michael.sinatra@umontreal.ca
Notification of acceptance will be communicated to authors by 1 July 2026.
Presentations, in English or French, should not exceed 20 minutes.
The organisers will cover accommodation costs for all invited speakers.
Publication of the proceedings is envisaged.
The colloquium is organised within the framework of the ERC ModERN project and
the L’Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes (ITEM – UMR 8132 CNRS/ENS), in
collaboration with the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités
numériques (CRIHN) and the Groupe de Recherche sur les Éditions critiques en
contexte Numérique (Université de Montréal).
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted
List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org
Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/
Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
