His research interests are in theories of interpretation and understanding; aesthetics; the philosophy of music; German philosophy from Kant to Habermas; and the problems of relativism and incommensurability. His teaching interests in the areas of intellectual history  include the Enlightenment; ancient Greek culture; the history of ethnography; French anthropology; the Holocaust; and the Israel-Palestine conflict. In literature, he teaches courses is high modernism; twentieth-century German and French literature, Shakespeare, and the Western Epic tradition from Homer to Pound. He has published articles on Paul Celan and the Book of Job as well as Image and Death in the Drama of Jean Genet, and has presented conference papers on the spatial orientation of Giacometti's sculpture and anti-realism in contemporary politics. More recently, Saul has been writing fiction and autobiography, not always keeping these separate. An essay about his father from 2012 can be found in Baltimore Fishbowl.