Lily Saint is Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan. Her book Black Cultural Life in South Africa: Reception, Apartheid, and Ethics (University of Michigan Press 2018) explores the nexus of ethics and cultural practice in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Saint is  editor with Bhakti Shringarpure of the new book series "Routledge African Writers: Intellectual Biographies, Literary Histories," and is writing the volume on J.M. Coetzee.  She co-edited a special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry on "Genre in Africa" (2017) and has published articles and essays in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, the Journal of African Cultural Studies, the Journal of the African Literature Association, Postcolonial Studies, the Journal of African Cinemas, and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to Africa Is a Country.

At Wesleyan, she teaches classes on global and postcolonial literature and theory, contemporary and canonical African novels, historical fiction, and ethical theory.

Professor Saint has a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which was awarded the Irving Howe Prize for Best Dissertation Involving Politics and Literature in 2011. She has a B.A. in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Wesleyan, she taught in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh.