Jeffrey Meikle

Jeffrey Meikle is an American cultural historian and historian of design, currently the Stiles Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is best known for two studies of American material culture: Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 (1979), and American Plastic: A Cultural History (1995).

Meikle is generally credited as one of the founders of the discipline of design history; his essay, "Ghosts in the Machine: Why It's Hard to Write about Design," published in 2005, lays out some of the central issues confronting the field.[1]

Partial bibliography

• Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979.
• American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
• Design in the USA. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931-1950. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.
• (editor, with Miles Orvell), Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009.

References

1. Jeffrey Meikle, "Ghosts in the Machine: Why It's Hard to Write about Design," Technology and Culture, Volume 46, Number 2, April 2005, pp. 385-392