Professor Meisel, who served as Department of English and Comparative Literature Chair (1980-83) and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Vice President (1989-93), came to Columbia in 1968 after having taught at Rutgers, Dartmouth, and the University of Wisconsin.

He has held grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at Edinburgh, Huntington Library, National Humanities Center, and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

He is currently at work on a book concerning the imagination and representation of chaos from Hesiod to Beckett.