Paul Saint-Amour works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and has special interests in the novel, law, trauma, visual culture, sound studies, and the environmental humanities. He received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Stanford and has been a fellow of the Stanford Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for the Humanities at Cornell, the Howard Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Saint-Amour's The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Cornell UP, 2003) won the MLA Prize for a First Book. His articles have appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, ELH, MLQ, Modernism/modernity, Novel, PMLA, and Representations. His most recent book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford UP, 2015), won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and the MLA's first annual Matei Calinescu Prize.

Saint-Amour has served as president of the Modernist Studies Association and as a trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation (IJJF). A panel he chaired for the IJJF produced a detailed FAQ on the copyright status of Joyce's work and the general parameters of scholarly fair use. He has served on the editorial board of PMLA and has chaired the faculty editorial board of the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is currently a trustee of the English Institute.

With Jessica Berman, Saint-Amour co-edits the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia UP. He edited the volume Modernism and Copyright (2011) for Oxford UP's Modernist Literature and Culture series. In 2018 he edited a special issue of Modernism/modernity on weak theory.