[1] Patell was born in 1961 to a Filipina mother and Pakistani Parsi father, both students at Columbia University.
His dissertation, supervised by Sacvan Bercovitch, was entitled The cultural logic of individualism in late twentieth century America.
Before taking up his position at NYU, he was a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.
His publications include: Patell also served as associate editor for the first two volumes of the Cambridge History of American Literature (general editor, Sacvan Bercovitch) and contributed the "Emergent Literatures" section to volume seven, Prose Writing, 1940–1990.
He is the co-editor (with Deborah Lindsay Williams) of The Oxford History of Literature in English: Volume 8, American Fiction after 1940 (general editor, Patrick Parrinder).