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:

mailto:glenn.roe@ens.psl.eu

mailto:dario.nicolosi.92@gmail.com

mailto: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).