Academic Archive – Warhammer Conference

Welcome to our academic archive! Here you can find a list of academic book chapters and journal articles exploring the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. We also include academic materials on the subject of Games Workshop (the business) and its history. To suggest items for this list, please email Dr Mike Ryder.

Journal articles

Brown, C. M. (2024). Towards Generic Fascism: Right-Wing Totalitarian Aspects in the Universe of Warhammer 40,000, Croatian Political Science Review, 61(2), 29–51. https://doi.org/10.20901/pm.61.2.02
Carter, M., Gibbs, M., & Harrop, M. (2014). Drafting an Army: The Playful Pastime of Warhammer 40,000, Games and Culture, 9(2), 122–147. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412013513349
Cova, B., Pace, S., & Park, D. J. (2007). Global Brand Communities Across Borders: The Warhammer Case. International Marketing Review, 24(3), 313-329. https://doi.org/10.1108/02651330710755311
Lindahl, O., Timonen, A., & Meriläinen, M. (2024), Why Did You Pick That Army? Player Personality Traits and Faction Choice in the Miniature Wargame Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Imagination, Cognition and Personality. https://doi.org/10.1177/02762366241309540
Meriläinen, M., Stenros, J., & Heljakka, K. (2020). More Than Wargaming: Exploring the Miniaturing Pastime. Simulation & Gaming, 104687812092905. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878120929052
Ryder, M. (2021). Conscripts from birth: War and soldiery in the grim darkness of the far future. Fantastika Journal, 5(1), 47–60.
Singleton, B. E. (2020). “We Offer Nuffle a Sausage Sacrifice on Game Day”. Blood Bowl Players’ World-building Rituals through the Lens of Theory of Sociocultual Viability. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 50(2), 176-201. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241620948244
Smith, T. B. M. (2025). Miniature Mindfulness: Finding Spiritual Flow with Warhammer 40,000 Models. Religions, 16(2), 121. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16020121
Timonen, A. (2025): Cheese vs. Fluff – The Temporal Shift of Metagame and Paragame in Warhammer, ACM Games: Research and Practice, 3(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715272
Walliss, J. (2010). Girls Go Slash/Boys Go Bang: Gender, Canon and Creativity within Warhammer 40,000 Fanfiction. Popular Culture Review, 21, 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2831-865X.2010.tb00381.x
Wang, R., & Li, P. (2023). Warhammer fandom in China: A brief introduction. Transformative Works and Cultures, 41. h ttps://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2023.2375
Williams, I., & Tobin, S. (2022). The Practice of Oldhammer: Re-Membering a Past Through Craft and Play. Games and Culture, 17(4), 576-592. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211049577

Books

Batlle, I. C. (ed) (2025) The Psychgeist of Pop Culture: Warhammer. Play Story Press. https://doi.org/10.17613/x8qxk-wwm23

Book chapters

Carter, M., Harrop, M., & Gibbs, M. (2014). The Roll of the Dice in Warhammer 40,000. In F. Mäyrä, K. Heljakka, & A. Seisto (Eds.), Physical and Digital in Games and Play (pp. 191–218). ETC Press: Edinburgh.
Crowe, N. (2011). “We Die for the Glory of the Emperor”: Young People, Warhammer, and Role-Playing War Online. In J. M. Beier (Ed.), The Militarization of Childhood: Thinking Beyond the Global South (pp. 153–173). Palgrave Macmillan US, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/97811 37002143_9
McAuley, A. (2019). The Divine Emperor in Virgil’s Aeneid and the Warhammer 40k Universe. In B. M. Rogers and B. E. Stevens (Eds.) Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy (pp. 183–195). London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350068971
Meriläinen, M., Stenros, J., & Heljakka, K. (2022). The Pile of Shame: The Personal and Social Sustainability of Collecting and Hoarding Miniatures. In S. S. Muthu (Ed.), Toys and Sustainability (pp. 57-77). Singapore: Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9673-2_4
Meriläinen, M., Heljakka, K., & Stenros, J. (2022). Lead Fantasies – The Making, Meaning and Materiality of Miniatures. In C. Germaine & P. Wake (Eds.) Material Game Studies (pp. 83-101). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Reichart, André. (2019) ‘Das Adeptus Sororitas. Die Heilige Jungfrau in der dystopischen Welt von ‚Warhammer 40.000‘’, in Technik und Gender. Technikzukünfte als geschlechtlich codierte Ordnungen in Literatur und Film, ed. Marie-Hélène Adam, Katrin Schneider-Özbek, and Andie Rothenhäusler (Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing), 223–42, https://doi.org/10.5445/KSP/100005 1991.
Sturrock, I., & Wallis, J. (2016) Total Global Domination: Games Workshop and Warhammer 40,000. In: P. Harrigan & M. G. Kirschenbaum (eds.) Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargames. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10329.003.0062

PhD theses

Darzentas, Dimitrios Paris (2018) The lives of objects: designing for meaningful things. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.

Conference proceedings

Darzentas, D., Hazzard, A., Brown, M., Flintham, M., and Benford, S. (2015) The Data Driven Lives of Wargaming Miniatures. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2427–2436. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702377
Darzentas, D., Hazzard, A., Brown, M., Flintham, M., and Benford, S. (2016) Harnessing the Digital Records of Everyday Things, in Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Future Focused Thinking – DRS International Conference 2016, 27 – 30 June, Brighton, United. Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.400
Harrop, M., Gibbs, M., & Carter, M. (2013) Everyone’s a Winner at Warhammer 40K (or, at least not a Loser). Proceedings of DiGRA 2013 Conference. https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/673
Prax, P. (2022) Networked Participation sets the Game Free – Warhammer 40k on Tabletop Simulator. Proceedings of DiGRA 2022 Conference.
https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/1347/1347

Websites and magazines

Ryder, M. (2024) ‘Five reasons Warhammer 40,000 should be considered a great work of science fiction’, The Conversation, 28 October. Available at: https://theconversation.com/five-reasons-warhammer-40-000-should-be-considered-a-great-work-of-science-fiction-241040
Ryder, M., Arnold, T., & Dunn, M. (2024) ‘Why Warhammer Matters’, Sci Phi Journal, 13 December. Available at: https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2024/12/13/why-warhammer-matters/