Matthew Wilhelm Kapell (born August 14, 1969) is an historian and anthropologist whose Ph.D. is in American Studies. He is best known for 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 co-edited The Films of James Cameron: Critical Essays in 2011. All of the volumes provide multiple essays by academics and others on different cultural interpretations on the films and franchises under examination. Kapell has also published a number of essays in the journal Extrapolation, and elsewhere, on speculative fiction in the United States as intellectual history.
He has 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's 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.
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.