Jeffrey Meikle is an American cultural historian and historian of design, and a Professor in the American Studies and American Civilization Programs of the University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...

. He is best known for two studies of American material culture: Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 (1982), and American Plastic: A Cultural History (1997). He 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.

Partial bibliography

• Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.
• American Plastic: A Cultural History.New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
• Design in the USA. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• (editor, with Miles Orvell), Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture.Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009.