Ramón Saldívar's teaching and research areas at Stanford have concentrated on the areas of cultural studies, literary theory, modernism, Chicano narrative, and Post-colonial literature. He is also interested in the history of the novel and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American comparative studies. With a degree in Comparative Literature, his publications reflect the variety of his interests. His first book, Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (1984), was a study of the authority of meaning in selected canonical European and American novels. His second book, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), is a history of the development of Chicano narrative forms. His most recent book, titled The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006), is a study of the modern American borderlands, transnationalism and globalism and their role in creating and delimiting agents of history.

Saldívar has served on the Board of Governors of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, on the Editorial Board of American Literature, and Modern Fiction Studies and on the national council of the American Studies Association. He is a past recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Council on Chicanos in Higher Education grant, a Danforth Doctoral Fellowship and various University of Texas Research Institute Faculty Awards. At Stanford, he has received Irvine and Bing curriculum development grants. He is the 1994 recipient of the Lillian and Thomas B. Rhodes Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford, the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contribution to Undergraduate Education in 1998, and is the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences and Milligan Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.