The world's first academic conference dedicated to all things Warhammer
This paper examines the transformation of the Emperor of Mankind in Warhammer 40,000 from architect of the anti-religious Imperial Truth into the supreme object of the Imperium’s compulsory devotion. Rather than treating this reversal as mere irony, it reads the God-Emperor as a fictional test case for theories of secularization, cognitive naturalness, and political theology. …
The worlds of Warhammer are populated by a plethora of strange creatures. In Warhammer Fantasy, one encounters many famous figures of medieval imagery; dragons, unicorns, griffins, and many more. Other beings come more or less directly from Greek mythology, such as pegasi, minotaurs or hydras. And many real-world animals are given the typical Warhammer over-the-top …
Gender representation in Warhammer fiction has been controversially discussed for decades. The issue has also featured prominently in scientific work, as well as in previous iterations of the Warhammer conference (e.g. Anjou, 2024; Keenan, 2025; Meriläinen, 2024; Naylor, 2025). A key conclusion from this previous work is that, particularly in earlier Warhammer fiction, female characters …
Since 2010, youth services in England have sustained real-terms funding cuts of approximately 73%, with more than 760 youth centres and 4,500 youth work posts lost (YMCA, 2023). This paper asks what fills the gap and proposes that Games Workshop’s Warhammer stores represent one largely unexamined answer. Games Workshop has actively entered youth development space …
This talk explores death, undeath, and afterlife across the Imperium of Man, the galaxy’s civilizations, and the Warp. The Imperium’s citizens lack political enfranchisement; power is predicated on death and sacrifice, which serve as the civilization’s organizing principles. Undeath is a recurring theme in Warhammer, and special attention will be paid to the Necrons, the …
The recruitment, enhancement, and training of the Adeptus Astartes is legendarily brutal, with massive levels of attrition in everything from the trials aspirants undergo to be accepted into the Space Marines to the failure rate of the organs transplanted into those very same recruits. This arduous, arguably wasteful process is, in many cases, not performed …
The detection of xenos presence before the emergence of visible threats remains one of the major challenges of planetary biosecurity. Orkoid spore contamination, Genestealer infiltration, and Tyranid early stage invasion are just a few examples in which early detection of xenobiological hazards may enable timely intervention and protective measures, potentially avoiding the considerable economic and …
The presentation of religious and ethical concepts through public visual art has long been a means to communicate, form, and build identity in the public square—especially when literacy may be highly varied. This has often been conducted through the presentation of biblical and religious narratives as expressed through paintings, illustrated bibles, and stained glass.
In 1987, Games Workshop needed a backstory to sell miniature wargames. By 2024, that commercial necessity had produced one of the most institutionally coherent fictional polities in science fiction. This paper asks why the Imperium of Man often feels more ‘realistic’ than many science-fiction polities despite deliberate grimdark exaggeration.
Birds have long spoken to people’s imaginations, whether through their ability to fly, their relatively alien faces lacking familiar mammalian expressions, or perhaps their pervasive sounds that have for a long time coloured people’s lives. It is only natural that birds are a common presence in folklore and mythology. In my previous research on the …