He taught at New York University for over forty years prior to his retirement in 2016 and has written on literature, music, psychoanalysis, theory, and culture since the 1970s.
In graduate school, Meisel taught at Yale and Wesleyan; he also wrote on rock and jazz for Crawdaddy!
In 1978, Meisel was a charter Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, co-ordinating a reading group on theory whose members included Rosalind Krauss and Susan Sontag.
In 1980, he published The Absent Father, a study of Virginia Woolf's aestheticism and, in 1981, edited a collection of essays on Freud as literature.
In 1987, Meisel also fell ill. A diagnosis eluded him until seven years later, when he was diagnosed as suffering from an intractable case of temporal lobe epilepsy, resulting in frequent partial seizures from abrupt changes in light and noise and from digital and other new technologies.
He took refuge in his teaching and benefited from a greater literary productivity, turning his attention more exclusively to literature, theory, and psychoanalysis.
The Cowboy and the Dandy argues that rock and roll is the crossroads of Romanticism and African American culture.