Matthew Wilhelm Kapell is a historian and anthropologist, with master's degrees in each discipline, who has a Ph.D. in American Studies. 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. Kapell was educated at Schoolcraft College, The University of Michigan–Dearborn, Wayne State University, all in Michigan, United States, and at Swansea University, Wales, UK. He is best known for his work in media studies and frontier ideology in American history. Frontier Ideology in American History Kapell's book Exploring the Next Frontier: Vietnam, NASA, Star Trek and Utopia in 1960s and 1970s American Myth and History, from the academic publisher Routledge, examines notions of the frontier in American culture during the 1960s and 1970s. It specifically covers the American cultural reactions to the Vietnam War through the work novelist of Joe Haldeman, the NASA lunar missions, the television show Star Trek and Gerard K. O'Neill's concept of space colonization called the "High Frontier." Film and Television Studies He has published four edited academic volumes on popular culture, film, and television. The first, (with William G. Doty) is Jacking In to the Matrix Franchise: Cultural Reception and Interpretation (2004). The second is (with John Shelton Lawrence) Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, and Critics (2006) and adds Wilhelm to his name. In 2010 Kapell published Star Trek as Myth: Essays on Symbol and Archetype at the Final Frontier and, working with British scholar Stephen McVeigh, Kapell edited The Films of