Matthew Wilhelm Kapell is an historian and anthropologist, with Master's Degrees in each discipline, who has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Swansea University in Wales, UK. Early in his career he co-authored chapters on the genetics of human growth and the effects of poverty on growth. The majority of this work appeared while he taught anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Included among these are essays published mainly in edited European and Indian (Asia) works attacking ideas of genetic factors in determining development of height and body shape. Other publications include works on the computer game Civilization, Holocaustal images in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the American speculative fiction and socialist writer Mack Reynolds re-working of the Utopian fiction of Edward Bellamy, and Christian Romance fiction. Kapell has also published a number of essays in the journal Extrapolation, and elsewhere, on speculative fiction in the United States as intellectual history. His work in history is mainly focused American frontier ideology in the contemporary period, though he has also published on the representation of "race" in the Detroit media during World War II and the legal history of British colonial marriage law in Africa. He is best known for his work in media studies, especially film, television and computer game studies.
